Christmas is celebrated on the 24th in Finland. Families meet up and exchange gifts, they might even get a visit from Santa who will give out the presents. It was a really cold morning, a really, really cold morning - the mercury was showing it was -29c and the digital thermometer was -27.5c. So whether it was one or the other, or somewhere in between, it was cold! The windows of the cottage had beautiful ice crystals. Looking beyond the ice crystals, it was...

We woke up a bit bleary eyed at 8:30am with the alarm ringing. To our jet lagged bodies this was 6:30am, but with some fresh, strong coffee from the pot and a bit of Finnish breakfast, we soon felt a lot better. While we showered and sorted through the holdals of winter clothes we had left in Kemi, Maria's mum, Soile, moved our backpacks from the back seat of the car into the boot. It wasn't that easy of a task for her either - the extreme cold had frozen the b...

We slept in rather late this morning, and we could blame jet lag coming from Scotland or it might just be going to bed late last night. Sari and Ömer were long gone, they had started work hours ago. Jasmin was still at home though, school had finished a few days ago, and she made us breakfast. Our original plan for our day in Helsinki before flying North to Kemi was to meet Maria's friends Anne and Ivan from Spain, but their kids were sick. As it was snowi...

The alarm was set early today, we needed to be up, showered, eaten breakfast and out the door by 10am. We were booked on the SAS flight at 1pm to Stockholm with an onward connection to Helsinki. The drive from Melrose, in the Scottish Borders, to Edinburgh airport would take an hour at best and longer if there was traffic delays. We were ready to leave about 9:45am so we thought just to leave anyway. Better to be a bit early at the airport than late. David's pa...