i keep a diary

February 01, 2005

Baltic Vacation Part Three: Meeting Up with the Boys in Helsinki

After four days in traveling alone in Tallinn, Estonia, it was finally time for me to meet to head across the water and meet up with Grant and Jake.

Monday, January 31st

Tuesday morning I got up super early and headed to the harbor in Tallinn so I could take the ferry over to Helsinki, Finland to meet up with Grant and Jake. Nothing else was open except McDonalds - and they don't have a breakfast menu in Estonia. Mmmmm...what's up, 7:4am cheeseburger?
I made it down to the harbor and got my tickets with plenty of time left to kill so I decided to read my book and have...
...a second breakfast! Oh, hello there weird yet tasty Estonian meat-filled croissant thingy.
Fast-forward about 45 minutes later and it was time to board the fancy, big-ass boat!
Check out the rad interior. Note to any fellow travelers: Fizzy Coke + Breakfast meat croissant thingy + choppy-water ferry ride = Crazy-smelly meat burps. Hahahaha.
Good thing most of the nearby passengers were Finns that were already too wasted (at 9am!!) to care about my olfactory disturbance.
Finland, ho!
The water in the harbor is calm enough that it was actually freezes! (According to Google, sea water freezes at 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Holy shit). I got off the boat - and right on time - Grant and Jake were there to meet me! (Yay! Let's hear it for no-longer having to travel alone!)
Tacky Americans that we are - we immediately headed to McDonalds to celebrate! (Actually, Finland is a lot pricier than Estonia and so McDonalds was one of the few places there that fit into our "we're trying to spend as little money as possible" broke-ass traveler's budget).
Moving on up! As soon we FINNISHed (ha!) wolfing down our foreign Big Mac's, Grant and Jake took me to the Hotel Kamp (the super-expensive and fancy hotel that Finlandia Vodka had put them up in) so that I could drop off my bags.
On the way up to Grant's room, we noticed that another guest of the hotel had neglected to FINNISH (ha again!) their smoked salmon.
At 40 Euros a plate, we weren't about to let that shit go to waste! Cuh-lassy!
After eating a weird meat-pie thingy and McDonalds twice all before 2pm, I was pretty psyched to find out that the toilet was equipped Euro-style rocking the (very necessary) handheld bidet attachment that allows you to shower just your ass.
I took care of business, unpacked my stuff, took a quick shower (sometimes a bidet just isn't enough if you know what I'm sayin') and then decided to get comfy and lounge in one of the ultry-downy hotel-provided robes and sets of slippers. Grant came back to the room - saw how I was lounging in style and quickly decided to get his robe-on as well. We called Jake to come up to Grant's room to hang out and when he showed up rocking his robe as well, we knew it was time for a photo shoot.
We all busted out our matching furry hats, set up my camera on top of the TV on auto-timer...
...and got the "we're low-class dorks staying in a fancy hotel for free" photo shoot going!
Hahaha.
Oh, snap!
The very necessary close up. After we'd gotten a satisfactory "cold-lamp" pose locked down, Grant decided he wanted me to try capturing him pulling off a David Lee Roth split kick off of the hotel window ledge.
Here's Grant helping me find the right focus for the cam and them...
...BLAMO! Attempt number one...so close!
Attempt number two! Bingo! Grant extended his legs as fully as he could without exposing his luggage to the camera.
Here's Jake's off-the-window sill robe-and-hat action shot.
Then, never one to shy away from showing his luggage, Jake started doing high-legged crescent kicks for the camera. First attempt: Pretty good.
Second attempt: Getting closer.
This photo caused Grant Stoddard to laugh harder than I've ever seen him laugh at anything before. He literally had a five minute long hysterical fit where he COULD NOT stop laughing. So Grant, this one's for you:
Here's Grant after he finally got his laughing under control. He laughed so hard that his eyes swelled up!
Tired out from all high high-kickin' hijinx, Jake decided to stay at the hotel and relax while Grant and I ventured out to explore Helsinki.
This building is probably the most exciting thing that Helsinki had to offer. We took a photo of it and then decided to hit a internet cafe so that we could check our email.
And so Grant could catch up on the entries I posted to this very site (I'm so meta!) before leaving for Estonia. But because of all the questionable content I post (like Jake's deep-shaved ass), he didn't want to surf on it too long for fear that he'd...
...violate the cafe's strict "NO PORNS HERE" rule and end up having to pay a hefty 20 Euro fine! After a few more hours of walking around and exploring...
...we headed back to the hotel to...
...mack and relax in the lobby while waiting to meet up with the hosts of the Finlandia trip who were planning on taking the trip attendees on one final fancy dinner before bidding everyone farewell. (Grant and Jake asked the hosts nicely and they were gracious enough to invite me along. Thanks guys!)
Here's Grant using the Financial Times as a screen to scout for hot Finnish chicks.
The less-subtle Jake forwent the paper and blatantly leered at the ladies.
The Finlandia crew: Gus, Rich (from Brown-Forman), Karen, Grizz and Jordan. (I think I got all of their names right, Grant?)
After a few aperitifs in the hotel's bar, we headed a few blocks over to some fancy restaurant called Mecca.
The food was incredible - but it was hard to hear the dinner conversation over...
...Karen's incessant clacking as she furiously took notes about the dinner conversation on her AlphaSmart 3000. (Actually, for as much as we joked around about it, this thing's pretty fucking rad. It weighs 2lbs, will run for 700 hours using only THREE AA BATTERIES and when you're done taking notes, you can upload them to any computer via infrared and the thing only costs $139 dollars. Amazing.)
I take back every bad thing I said about Alphasmart, Karen. (But I will, however, continue to make fun of your "cat shirts."). Before leaving NYC, Grant and I ran into our friend friend Tracy. When Tracy heard that we were going to be visiting Helsinki, he gave us his friend Sanna's number and told us to call her and that she'd take us out. So after we finished dinner, Grant, Jake, Jordan and I called Sanna and she told us to meet her a few blocks from Mecca at a place called Errotija Bar. On our way out of the restaurant, Jake saw cute girls at the restaurant's bar and told us that he wanted to try to meet them and that he'd see us at the bar later. We (laughingly) wished him good luck and headed out.
So Jordan, Grant and I meet up with Sanna at the bar. We're all hanging out, drinking a few beers, laughing about Jake thinking he's got enough game to lay the mack on foreign girls and then the next thing you know...
...Jake shows up at the bar with Renja, the hot Finnish girl he'd wanted to meet and her friend.
I think Grant's face sums up our collective surprise.
Jake was on fire. He was being all charming and telling jokes...working his way up to getting all smoochy-smoochy.
Grant, meanwhile, was across the table making polite conversation with Renja's friend (who I think was named Marja?).
Anyway, Jake starts telling Renja that Grant has no game and that when wants to hit on a girl resort to trying to make conversation about the weather. As if on cue, like 30 seconds later we all overhear Grant ask Marja "So, do you get a lot of rain here in Helsinki?" and the three of burst out laughing at Grant. Grant and Jake are really competitive so as soon as Grant realizes that Jake's making jokes at his expense, he demands to know what's so funny. Renja explains to Grant that she's laughing "because he doesn't know how to make conversation with girls so he talks about the rain!" Grant gets furious and screams that Jake is a "DIRTY JEW LIAR!" (Don't forget: before leaving for the trip, Grant and I had convinced Jake that Estonia and Finland were HIGHLY anti-semetic countries and that he should call himself "Jack Brownstone" and never let on that he's Jewish. )

Grant was really upset that Jake would try to make time with a girl by putting him down and decided to dedicate the rest of his night to ruining any chance Jake had of making out with Renja.
Jake still wasn't sure if we were kidding about all Finns HATING Jews, so Grant decided to keep chipping away at his confidence by sending ever-so subtle messages to Renja behind Jake's back about him being Jewish. He started off by trying remind her about his "Jew nose." Very, very subtle.
Then, every oh, twenty seconds or so, he'd do this behind Jake's back while fiercely mouthing the words "JEW HORNS! HE HAS JEW HORNS!"
Jake finally got wise to Grant's behind-the-back shenanigans and started getting him back by telling the girls embarrassing stories about Grant. This quickly escalated to a back and forth session with Grant and Jake taking turns trying to out-embarrass each other. Jake touched a nerve when he told Grant that he was "An agry little man!" and Grant came back by standing up from his chair and shouted "GIRLS DON'T TOUCH HIM! HE IS A FILTHY, HAIRY JEW! IN FACT, HE'S SO HAIRY HE HAS TO DEEP SHAVE HIS ASS! HE DEEP-SHAVES HIS ASS!"
The girls, who had for ten minutes politely endured Grant and Jake's one-upmanship, finally seemed to realize it wasn't going to end anytime soon, and told the boys they had to get going. (Either that or they had spoke English well enough to understand the curiously idiomatic expression "deep shaves his ass.") Judging by the expression on Marja's face, I'm willing to bet it was the latter.
Hey, homeboy still managed to get her number though. Oh, snap!
So now it's me, Grant, Jake, Sanna, another girl named Sanna, Jordan and another Finnish friend of Sanna's named Walter left at the bar.
Jake and Walter are getting drunk and taking lots of pictures and Jake realizes that as Walter's getting progressively drunker, Walter's left eye is becoming, to put it politely, slightly less co-operative than his right eye.
And then for the next hour or so, despite Walter being the nicest guy we'd met in Finland, Jake decided to send subtle signals to the camera to check out Walter's eyes.
Okay, maybe they weren't all that subtle. Cool? Not really.
Funny? Oh, yes.
Despite the fact that he caught Jake pointing at his floater (Jake: "Wow, he can see pretty good for a guy with a wonky eye.") Walter was a good enough guy to still head out to an hours club with Jake, Sanna and myself (Grant, being a huge pussy, decided to head back to the hotel early).
Here's we are on our way into some after hours place that I think was called "Lost & Found."
We ended up having a rad time.
Walter and Jake.
Jake and Sanna.
Jake managed to capture the creepy happy face I make when I'm drunk and I dance.
Twice.
Three strikes and you're out. Sit the fuck down, clownface!
Jake, me and (cutely drunk) Sanna.
Here's us getting kicked out at closing time (I think it was 4am?)
I snapped this pic of naked men cooperatively striking an anvil on our cold, snowy walk back to the hotel.

Tuesday, February 1st

On Wednesday morning we woke up with just enough time to catch the fancy hotel breakfast (shit cost $50 per person and Finlandia picked up the tab! Oh, snaaaap!) and for Grant and Jake to bid farewell to their Finlandia hosts and rest of the people they'd traveled through Finland with. Jake, Grant and I then checked out of the hotel, stored our bags in the hotel's luggage room and decided to spend our last few hours exploring Helsinki before we had to catch the 5:15pm ferry back to Estonia later that afternoon.
We ended up at some weird mall / movie theater / art gallery that was showing a Jeff Koons retrospective. (Before leaving, Grant had pitched a travel piece on Finland to New York Magazine and wanted to make sure he had a few "cultural" things to write about...besides Jake's asshole, I mean.)
Oh, and because we like art.
Jeff Koons makes art that's easy to like. He's all about huge, glossy porno pics and giant, stylized porcelain sculptures of early-80s Michael Jackson posing with his chimp, Bubbles.
And all these rad little mylar-balloon looking sculptures that are actually made out of highly-polished stainless steel.
Photos were forbidden in the gallery so all the shots I took above were sneaky ones I was firing from the hip. Here's a close up I took from a web site about Koon's work that better shows how much the stainless-steel works really look like inflatable mylar. Neato! (Click here for an even-better pic!)
Afterwards, we wandered through a maze of construction.
It seemed like the whole city was under construction.
Walked around.
Walked around some more...
Then after nixing a bunch of Finnish restaurants, we opted to catch a cheap lunch at a sketchy Chinese restaurant. After lunch, we stopped by the hotel, picked up the bags we'd left in the luggage room and headed for the harbor to catch the ferry to Estonia!
We gorged ourselves on a giant bag of (duty-free!) Finnish candy.
Lemme see those Jazz Hands!
And promptly took turns conking the fuck out.
Jake sleeps with his mouth open. (This is known as foreshadowing. Much like Jake's deep-shaved ass, this is something that will be relevant in a future post...Hahahaha.)
Not many people know this about me, but I'm even funny in my sleep. Here's me doing my cut-up impression of the Emperor Palpatine. Spot on!
Grant puffed away on his little licorice pipe and daydreamed about Estonian hizzores. Tallinn, here we come...