today we woke up and headed to the market square to jump on a boat to the UNESCO world heritage suomenlinna sea fortress.

for 4 euros, we boarded a small ship to take us to the islands. the trip out of the harbor provided a great photo opp. of the most common photo of the lutheran cathedral with the colorful buildings in front of it as well as the huge ships sitting in the harbor. the sky was very dramatic with sporadic low hanging clouds, but the sun was pushing through them. it was a cool 65 degrees. perfect weather to be outside exploring the sea fortress.
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it was very easy traveling from the airport to the city to the hostel. course, you have to keep your eyes open for clues, understand maps, ask people questions, and follow others who might know the way. even if you don’t possess those qualities, you would be fine anyways. i have yet to run into a person who doesn’t know some english, and the transportation system is very good.

i slept about four hours on the plane, and overall, we felt pretty alert and ready to explore the city. Helsinki is an incredibly easy city to explore. it is flat, surrounded by water on three sides (so you can’t just keep walking into oblivion), and extremely compact. i would say about 80% of everything you want to see is either cramped into a very small area city area or on a surrounding island. on our first day, we saw amazing architecture, sculptures, churches, sipped coffee on terraces, began wrapping our english geared minds around the street names, and met up with john’s friend, katri. we were very fortunate in having the sun come out since the weather reports had scheduled rain. it sprinkled a little at the sibelius monument, but the whole day was a cool 65 degrees and partly cloudy.
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in this day in age, airplane food is a rarity. i vaguely remember being served airplane food. so, when i am given airplane food, i feel like it is a reward or a benefit for flying on foreign carriers. we dined on minaturized salad, pasta with meatballs, tiny water, tiny fork, tiny toothpick, tiny everything. it was adequate and i was eyeing john’s plate for seconds. along with the food, we are served several drink services, given a pillow and blanket, and have a duty free cart where we can buy tax free items.
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welcome to the redesign of projectionlabs! the software is upgraded and a few new features have been introduced. my personal favorite is the sidebar grid that shows 9 random photos from the gallery. instead of directing you to the gallery when you click on it, a script pops them up in a little window (called a lightbox by the creator) and you can scroll through them by clicking the pic. there are some videos in the gallery and when those show up in the grid, it kinda destroys the functionality of the script and the arrangement of the page. oh well. if the pic doesn’t show up immediately, click the animated graphic to close the window. i will fix that little “undocumented feature” soon.

in the sunset pic in san fran above, there are the four countries john and i are visiting from august 20 to sept 6. it is going to be an amazing trip and i will post pics and rants as soon as i can. this will be the first time traveling with a laptop, so i’m sure i will be able to bore you to tears with excruciating detail of the adventures since i can write en route to the next place.

anyways, i have put a lot of time into this site and i hope you enjoy it. stay tuned via rss or by bookmarking the site.

ps – the site is best viewed in firefox since internet explorer is slow on catching up to the latest in web standards. i have also not tested the site in safrai, opera, or ie/mac 5, so if anyone is having trouble with the site layout, do yourself a favor and download firefox.