Suomi

A ten week full time internship and two half marathons in two weeks under the belt, I was really looking forward to my 'reward trip' to Helsinki to visit my good Finnish friends from last semester. I've been really interested in Scandinavian countries this year and I was interested to see how different or similar Finland would be compared to Norway and Denmark which I've visited before. I didn't know anything about Finland before this year; I probably would have guessed that Helsinki is somewhere in eastern Europe, but after hearing about it so much through my friends, I really wanted to visit it. The Finnish language is a completely unique language (nothing like Swedish or Danish), they love extremely salty liquorice, saunas are a very important part of life and alcohol is super expensive due to a huge tax (so masses of Finns go with big trolleys and suitcases with a boat to Estonia to buy cheap alcohol - it's quite funny). We also took that boat to Tallinn one day, a city which I also really liked - very cosy cafes, pubs and cobblestone streets. In Finland I stayed in Espoo, Finland's 2nd biggest city, but only about 15 minutes to Helsinki. Espoo is around a bay and the Autumn colours in the nature was beautiful when I was there - it didn't feel like a 'city' at all. The food was amazing too - I tried reindeer meat which was some of the tastiest meat I've ever tried (and actually very ecologically friendly and ethical), Finnish cheese with cloudberries, lingonberry moussey porridge, cinnamon rolls, delicious salmon, rye everything and lots and lots of coffee. Apparently the Finns are the biggest coffee drinkers in the world and I could definitely see that. Helsinki is such a cool city - I particularly liked the modern art gallery Kiasma, and the design museum. It's definitely a very design-orientated city - the new library for the Helsinki university is what dreams are made of. It might not be such a well-known country (especially in Australia), but Finland is definitely worth a visit.

iPhone photos - didn't have enough space for my real camera unfortunately!

Higher

I remember wishing as I stood, frozen, seriously considering if I could get a rescue helicopter to come airlift me out so I don't have to climb, unassisted, up any more snow-covered vertical rocks. We were so unprepared it's kind of funny - we didn't consider that there'd be so much snow on the mountain already. After not a lot of sleep and a trek to Munich for Oktoberfest the day before, I hazily woke up and put on my usual running clothes for the hike. All other pro hikers we came across had sticks, and proper hiking- and footwear for the snow, in true German/ Austrian style, and I could see them doubtfully eyeing my runners and PE shorts. The view on the peak (and actually constantly during the hike) was amazing and so rewarding after the scary & stressful climb up. On the way down the peak we had had enough of walking in deep snow and slid down a good hundred meters or so on our rainjackets.
I rewatched 'Touching The Void' recently and have started listening to 'The Dirtbag Diaries' stories (highly recommended if you like the outdoors in general) while working, and I've got this new urge to do more 'extreme' outdoor things - unfortunately just in time for winter.

Braunarlspitze, 2649m | Bregenzerwald | Vorarlberg, Austria

Hoher Freschen

Over the past three weekends I've gone on hikes and they've been so, so good. I've started to appreciate weekends so much more while working/interning, my first time to be working 9-5, 5 days a week. I love the work but I'm still finding it hard to get used to having relatively little free time, so I'm trying to pack as much into my weekends as I can. This hike we did three weeks ago and was pretty physically challenging. We did three mountain peaks that day, the last and tallest being Hoher Freschen at 2004 meters. We literally picked it at random from a map of mountains in the region. In the morning we met (slightly fuzzy due to local Oktoberfest celebrations the night before) and bought some picnic food at the market. It was a very tough hike but in excellent company - three very fit boys - and amazing amazing scenery. In the late afternoon when we could first spot the peak of Hoher Freschen we just laughed - it was already so late in the day and it seemed unachievably high. We did it though and saw our first snow of the season at the top, it was so silent and beautiful. It was pitch black by the time we got back and the kebabs we'd been fantasising about all day went down very nicely.

Mountain two

Living here has renewed an appreciation for nature and the outdoors in me, after thinking for so long in Sydney that I could only ever see myself living in a city. These photos are from the same place as my previous post, around Lünersee. This past Saturday I went on one, if not the, best hikes I've ever gone on - you might have seen on Instagram. I'll post photos from that soon, it was so beautiful.