Completist

In 2024 I visited every Tunnelbana station in Stockholm.  All 100 of them.  The procedure is tried and tested and has been the same for eighteen years of merseytart.com.

• take a train to a station
• take a photo with the station sign outside to prove I've been there
• walk to the next one

Then the procedure is reversed.  Sometimes I simply walk outside, take the photo and walk back in, but so long as I pass through the ticket gates, that's fine.  The important thing is that picture proving I was there.  I've done it literally hundreds of times.

Which is why it was annoying when I got back to England, looked through my photos to write this blog, and realised I'd missed one.  I'd forgotten to take one single sign picture.

Kärrtorp.

I'm not saying that I took the ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm specifically to go to Kärrtorp.  I went back to the stations of the Blue Line to coo and sigh and take more pictures.  I wandered round the city.  I stayed overnight in a nice hotel.  I got a flight back to Manchester the next morning at a cheaper price than if I'd flown from Helsinki.

What I will say is that when I walked to Slussen station from the ferry port, the very first train I got was a Green number 17 train going south to Skarpnåck.  I traveled seven stations.  I got off at Kärrtorp.  I went through the ticket barriers into the little pedestrian plaza outside, stood in front of the station sign, and took a picture.

Then I turned round and walked back up to the platform and got another train.  Job done.  

Boaty McBoatface

Blogging is a dying art.  You know it, I know it.  Actually, as I write this, I'm not even sure anyone is going to read them.  Who can be bothered reading all those words in 2025, when you can get soundbites and micro-blogs and Threads fed to you?  In fact, never mind having to read at all: break out the cameras and the microphones and let's go full influencer.  That's where the money is.

I've long resisted videos based on the fact that, well, I know what I sound like when I talk.  I've known for forty eight years that I can write but I can't speak.  The internet came along in the 2000s and gave us socially awkward losers hope that maybe we could be useful members of society; our brains were valued more than our looks.  What we said was more important.  Then came YouTube and cameraphones and always-on high speed broadband and you didn't need to be able to say anything any more, you just had to be pretty and boisterous and outgoing.  And preferably have big tits.

I've tried doing a couple of videos before, where I played with some not-Lego.  I thought I might try to push this a bit further on the Helsinki trip.  I didn't want to do the whole week as a video, but I did have an experience that I thought would make interesting content.  I was going on a boat.

There's an overnight ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm every night and I thought it would be fun to take the ferry and do a kind of video blog of it.  Stick it on YouTube, see what the reaction was, see if it worked.

I went to the Viking Line port at Katajanokka in plenty of time for my ship, as advised.  "The gates will be open two hours ahead of sailing," it said, so I turned up two hours ahead of sailing, because I am a very well-brought up young man and I do as I am instructed.  A quick scan of my QR code at an automated terminal and I was issued with a credit card-sized piece of paper.  This was the key to my berth on board (oh yes, I know the lingo). 

I followed the crowds up and round to the departure gate and this was where I was hit by my own naivety.  I'd thought that as it was a ferry, and we all had our own cabins, that we'd be welcome on the ship any time.  I thought we'd wander across when we wanted so we could partake of the delights of the ship.  

Nope.  Instead we were held in a tight lounge, decorated to look like a Moto service station but without the joie de vivre, with a single bar and not enough seats.  Not nearly enough seats.  The MS Viking Cinderella has a capacity of 2,700 passengers and they were all brought up into that little airless room.  For two hours I leaned up against a column and cursed everyone who worked at Viking Line from the CEO down to the lowliest waitress.

Finally we began to shuffle towards the one (1) access point for the ship.  Apparently we needed to have our IDs checked first, so the Viking Line laid on a couple of members of staff to do so.  And when I say "a couple" I'm talking literally: two men checking each and every passport and ID card.

Worse, there was no official queue, no roped off route for us, so people fed into the scrum from every direction.  We shuffled forwards, slowly, the time of departure getting nearer and nearer.  I'm afraid I got very Brexit in my head, calculating how the space could be reorganised so there was a proper line instead of this awful European throng.  In England there would've been a single file snaking through miles of rope fences and it would've worked a lot better.  I was about three rows back from the gangway when a senior looking man appeared and basically said "fuck it"; passport checks were suspended and the crowds were allowed to push through, IDs be damned.  If an international terrorist made it from Finland to Sweden that night he's the one to blame.  I'd used my waiting time to look up the schematics of the ship and learn what deck I was on and how to get there and I practically ran there to get ahead of the slow moving throngs.   

There it was.  My neat little cabin.  I'll let Video Me take over here:

I'm sure you'll agree the presenting and editing jobs will be flooding in from there.  Can I explain that the yellowish tinge to my glasses is because of the sunlight bouncing in?  I don't want you to think I have tinted lenses like Cliff Richard.  

There's also a guided tour of the cabin, if you want to hear from Video Me again:

Thrilling, I'm sure you'll agree.  I hope you enjoyed that because that's the last we'll hear from Video Me.  As you may have guessed from the several hundred words preceding the videos, I realised that I didn't actually like filming anything.  I didn't like talking to the camera, I didn't like videoing.  I'd thought I'd wander round the ship filming it, so you the reader-slash-viewer could experience it too, with my thoughts and ideas, and I realised I didn't want to do any of that.  I didn't want to be noticed.  I didn't want people to stare at me.  I didn't want people to hear me chatting to myself for "content".  In short, I didn't want to look like a cunt.

I wish I'd realised that before I bought a gimbal, mind.

I headed to the main entertainment deck.  There were restaurants and bars here, plus a theatre with some kind of show to keep the kids entertained, and even a casino.  It was, as I said in my video, a proper ship.  It was huge.  I was overawed by it.   

The restaurants were absolutely rammed; it seemed you'd be wise to book a slot ahead.  I couldn't see any spare tables so I did my usual trick.  I went to the pub.

The Admiral Hornblower promised a "truly British" experience and it certainly reminded me of a British pub: specifically The Favourite, the now-demolished flat-roofed establishment on my estate in the 1980s.  It had a plasticky, inauthentic feel, as you'd expect from a "British pub" on a ferry in Scandinavia.  I ordered a pint - they even had nonsensical imperial measures - and took up a spot to watch the entertainment, a little blonde man with a guitar singing No Woman No Cry.    

He ran through a selection of rock classics, mostly in English but with a peppering of Finnish ones too, which the crowd sang along to.  I sat in my seat (bolted to the floor) and supped my beer and watched.  He stepped away after a while, and an extremely jolly and extremely annoying woman came out to launch the karaoke night.

By this point I'd had enough beers to stop me finding it hopelessly embarrassing.  It was actually quite charming when they sang a Eurohit song I didn't know.  I wasn't really interested in the blokes doing My Way - I can get that in Liverpool city centre any time I want - it was the local songs that got everyone bouncing in their seats that I enjoyed.  This diva, for example: 

I subsequently ran into her outside the toilets and I told her I thought her singing was amazing.  She looked properly thrilled.

A few more songs and I decided to call it a night.  I was a bit worse for wear and I'd only eaten a bag of peanuts.  I decided to go up on the top deck to get a bit of air, definitely not stopping to sing Diamonds Are Forever or anything insane like that on the way.  I went up in the lift and stepped out into the twilight.

Out there, away from the land, surrounded by nothing but sea, all I could take in were the skies.  The incredible burnished skies.  Shifting layers of colour and shade.  Clouds that merged with the water. 

I stood there for a long time, until I began to feel chilled; I was only wearing a t-shirt and shorts.  I couldn't stop staring at the water and the light.

I went back up there when I woke the next morning.  The skies were heavier now - it had rained over night, and there was a dampness in the air.  The deck was slick with moisture.  By now though, we'd reached Sweden, and so instead of open water there were a hundred tiny forested islands drifting by.  We were working our way inland through deep inlets formed by glaciers thousands of years ago.   

Behind us was another ferry.  There are two companies who go overnight from Helsinki, and it seems they follow each other exactly.  It's strange how, as an island nation with a legendary naval history, we've sort of lost the idea of taking a ferry in the UK.  The minute aeroplanes were invented we decided we'd much rather do that, thank you very much.  There's still the ferries to Ireland, of course, plus Bilbao and the Hook of Holland and what's left of the Dover routes, but these are very much the bargain option.  If you haven't got a car people would think you were mad to take them.  

While I enjoyed the laid back journey, and it was very good value for money, I don't think I could stand it for more than one night.  Taking the ferry effectively killed any interest I may have had in going on a long ocean cruise.  After ten hours on board I already felt stir crazy; walking up and down the stairs, wandering around the decks, trying to find something new to look at.  There were the changing views now we were close to land, of course, but imagine being halfway across the Atlantic and all you can see is the water.  No wonder people spend the whole time getting drunk and filling their faces with buffets.  There's nothing else to distract you.

I packed up my bag and headed to the exit.  As with getting on board the boat, this was a long tedious wait in a chairless space.  We docked in Stockholm and then there was a length stretch of nothing while we watched an army of cleaners come aboard.

Again we had the advantage of coming ashore right in the city centre.  The Viking terminal is on Södermalm, and it was a twenty minute walk from me along the front to Slussen Tunnelbana station.  When the Blue Line extension opens there will be an even closer station at Sofia, ten minutes walk away, but that won't be until 2030.  Oh darn, I'll have to come back.

Slussen is still undergoing major building works; the new bus terminal is due to open in 2026, but it's a mess of routes and diversions.  It's still an improvement on my visit last year, when I couldn't even find the entrance.   

 

 

So here I was in Stockholm again, a year after my last visit.  There was only one thing to do.  And it wasn't break out the video camera.

Satunnainen

"Ooooh, more Helsinki posts!" said no reader ever.  It has gone on a bit, hasn't it?  It's gone on so long that when I wrote the first post someone messaged me to say they were going to Helsinki later in the year on holiday so they were looking forward to reading about it.  That person has subsequently had their holiday and come back to the UK and I'm still here writing it up.  In my, defence, I've had a lot going on at home so I've not had the space to carve out two hours to yammer on about Finland.  Also, I loved it all, so I wanted to give it the attention it deserved.

The point is, though the Helsinki Metro is all finished, there's some other transporty things I did in the city, so here they are, gathered together for your "pleasure".

The 15

Last year, when I travelled on the Lidingöbanan in Stockholm, I made notes as I travelled, a stream of consciousness that I put on the internet.  Finding myself in Helsinki with no more Metro stations to collect, I decided to go on the 15 tram and do the same again.  If you recall, this is a loop line that goes from Itäkeskus to Kellaniemi via the north of the city, entirely avoiding the middle of Helsinki.  Unlike the trams in the city centre, this has been built to modern light rail standards, with its own rights of way and bridges. It takes over an hour to get from one end to the other (time via the metro: less than thirty minutes) and nobody would do it unless they're an absolute nerd.  Oh look, that's me.  Here are some vague thoughts, hammered into something resembling a blog post.  It's ok, I don't mind if you don't read it.

Oh they are request buttons! I wasn’t sure. An old lady has pushed one to get off at Roihupelto. It seems to be a large retail park. 

I went to swap seats to the little two - I’m currently on a 4 - then I spy it’s for disabled people and back away. Here I have a little table with a USB socket but I’m charging off my battery anyway.  

Running down a grassy median with a lane of traffic and cycle lanes either side. Rocks and forests and now we’re on devoted track through fields. How far out are we going? This is positively rural.  I thought it would be suburbs all the way. Two old ladies, one in floral, one in animal print, haven’t stopped talking since they boarded. Meanwhile across from me is a straggly bearded fat man in denim reading a comic. He puts it away and takes out another one with Donald Duck on the front, looking annoyed in a snow drift. Donald Duck, not the man.

An expanse of large glass buildings that scream business park; it is completely devoid of life until we get to Viikin tiedepuisto, a park, and suddenly there’s a shopping mall and a quaint little red cabin. Floral has got off here but animal print remains. The seats are faux yellow leather but the best part is the aircon, blowing at maximum throughout. Stops are plain with minimal seating. An entire family gets on at Viikinmäki, three generations, and they spread themselves around the hinge in the tram. 

I’m still wet with sweat.  My face is dry but my shirt is disgusting. I should’ve changed it. At Oulunkylä there’s a railway station, cream clapboard and looking like it’s from the 19th century: a K train passes through and pauses as we move on. A woman takes the seat opposite me but she perches on the edge so that she can face the direction of travel. There are new apartments everywhere. Is Helsinki experiencing a boom or is this the effect of the tram? Five, six storey buildings with retail at the ground floor. A building site with a crane and more being built and then some older, more 1980s blocks. The family get off and the grandad whips out a camera and starts filming the building works. What a loser. Ahem. 

Across the motorway the buildings are starker and more old fashioned, though the tram has clearly caused a new quarter to be constructed. Houses now, little tin looking buildings in pastels and surrounded by thick gardens. Hämeenlinnanväylä is under a flyover, and it’s like being back in Amsterdam. Three young men in white vests board, one Black, one Asian, one white, oozing attitude and cockiness. They only last one stop. The white boy has a cigarette behind his ear. 

All weather football pitches with people actually playing football in this scorching weather then we’re in a tunnel under Huopalahti station. Yellow tile at the stop then another new neighbourhood under construction. 

We pause at Vihdintie - to even out the schedule no doubt - and Donald Duck packs up his comic and moves to the door to exit at the next one. A roundabout over a motorway junction, thick trees and daisies and past a McDonalds drive in which is empty even though it’s lunch time. There’s a huge hole in the ground to my left with the remnants of a building at its centre; I’m guessing an old factory. 

A man got on stinking of BO and I wonder if that’s what I smell like too. He had crutches and a coat on and a thick beard but he disembarks at the next stop. So many trees, mature and high, between buildings, along side tracks, like construction is only permitted in clearings. Another tunnel, unlit, smooth. The track is hidden behind fences and we end up at Ravitie where two twelve year olds get on, one with blonde dreadlocks poking out from under his baseball cap. The road we’re passing down is silent. No cars. A single walker in athletic gear. Starting to feel hungry. May have to invest in a sandwich. 

Apartment blocks and a large wide ring road. The boys are watching a video on their phone and we can all hear it, of course. Leppävaara station, under the overpass, then a stop beside the shops around the corner. An A train waits at the platform as we pass. The boys get off for the mall. It’s a popular stop. Their place is taken by a teenage girl with a badminton racket who immediately starts talking on her phone. We pause again, probably because this is such a popular stop - time to accommodate crowds. 

Take a swig of Pepsi Max - the aircon is now getting to my throat. How long have I been on here? An avenue between seven story blocks, new with the tram line, the trees still young but the flower beds blossoming. Up a slope past multi storeys and office blocks. Another motorway crossed and then a stop in the middle of a forest, apparently; there doesn’t seem to be anything around and nobody boards or alights. A few small houses, white homes behind fences, parasols poking up, then back into the countryside via a dizzying bridge over a motorway. The driver puts his foot down until we stop at another one with seeming no purpose; it’s right by the motorway junction and that’s all. Still, a young woman gets off here and she doesn’t look like she’s going hiking so who knows. 

Following the highway.  Maari has a huge drum like building like an atrium which looks impressive but is probably just an office block. We’re in the back of Aalto University and now there are teaching blocks and laboratories but the students have seemingly all gone home for the summer. The tram pauses at a square across from the metro station - a different entrance to the one I used. The next stop is the one I disembarked at before, Otaranta, and I can get glimpses of water through the trees. Badminton girl gets off here. 

Now it’s the final stretch to the terminus, four or five of us left, me the only one who came all the way - an hour and change to travel round the edge of the city. The voice cheerily announces metro station and terminus in three languages and then we stop. 

Tikkurilla

My last day in Helsinki was an awkward one.  I had checked out of my hotel at ten am, but my transport out of town wasn't until the evening.  I had my big heavy backpack with me so I didn't want to go to a museum or something, and it was roasting hot again, so I simply rode some trains and buses and metros all day to keep myself amused.  It doesn't take much.

I took a random local train from Helsinki Central and got off at Tikkurilla.  This was a stroke of good fortune, as it turns out this is something of a star station.  A wide glass bridge dotted with shops and facilities spans the tracks.  It was big and impressive while also being incredibly practical.

Either side were shopping malls with direct connections to the station.  I had a bit of a wander round, smirking gleefully to myself, then went back down to the platform for another random train north.

Yes the Swedish name for this station is Dickursby.  No that isn't why I stopped here.

Kerava

My randomly selected train terminated at Kerava and I disembarked in a small town on the edge of the city.  The station building was getting a lick of paint as I arrived, refreshing its soft pink woodwork.  I used a wood-panelled subway under the tracks to reach the station square.

Everything about it was charming.  The building sat neatly surrounded by open land; the lack of ticket barriers and fencing made it feel so much more welcoming.  Buses idled outside in a small exchange, ready to take train passengers onward.  There were a couple of small cafes and shops in the buildings nearby.

I hovered outside the bar, mulling whether to indulge myself with a quick pint.  This is where I'm meant to go off on a rant about the price of beer in Scandinavia, but have you been to a pub in the UK lately?  The A frame outside said a half litre of beer was €9, about £7.80 at today's prices.  I'm writing this with a pint of lager beside me which cost £4.80 so that fabled gap between British and Finnish beer prices is considerably narrower these days.  I passed on the beer in the end, because I knew I wouldn't be able to have just one, and I had a long day ahead of me.

There were, incidentally, some posters on the wall advertising an upcoming concert from Erika "Ich komme" Vikman.  Europe may not have embraced her at Eurovision but clearly Finland still loved her. (Käärijä, of "Cha Cha Cha" fame, had performed at an open air festival in a Helsinki park on the previous Saturday, and I had genuinely considered going until I realised I would only know one song and the rest would be in Finnish.  Also, going out on a Saturday night?  No thank you). 

Can I use this point to mention just how massive Finnish trains feel?  When I got on the one back from Kerava it was like boarding a space ship.

Oulunkylä

If you did read that load of old nonsense about the tram journey further up the page, first of all, bless you.  Secondly, you might have noticed a mention of Oulunkylä station, one of the points where the railway lines and the 15 tram cross.  I decided to jump off and take a closer look at it.

I was sadly disappointed.  Though the station building looked lovely from the street, closer inspection revealed it had been converted into private homes.  It's tremendously disappointing when that happens, no matter where you are in the world.  I want railway stations to be stations, dammit, and even if you don't want to have the full ticket office experience (though you should) it's nice to have a waiting room for the passengers that's not just a bus stop that thinks it's fancy.

There is at least some artwork at the station, in the form of a giant slanted clock at the entrance to the subway.

The theme continues in the murals on the wall.

I'm not sure why Oulunkylä is time-obsessed, but I'm going to take a moment to pat them on the back for at least having a clock that works.  It's a modern miracle.

That definitely says Oulunkylä.  The sun was in exactly the wrong place to to get a decent photo with all the text visible.  As usual, if you would prefer I went back and took a proper sign picture, please feel free to send me a Finnair ticket.

After that there was a lot of buses, which are great; today Diamond Geezer wrote about the consultations for Superloop 13 in London and it was a reminder that Helsinki has a load of trunk route buses that do express services and they don't feel the need to hype them up as a fantastic innovation that will change the city.  Helsinki's just great to get round.  It's fun.  Go if you can.

And yes, I did go on one of the old trams.  It was rickety and noisy and packed.

So I'd taken a plane to Helsinki.  I'd gone on the underground and commuter trains. I'd ridden the buses.  I'd gone on the trams and the light rail. What possible form of transport was there left for me to take?

A ferry, of course.

The Final Four

For decades, the area around what is now Kalasatama metro station was docks and wharves.  That's what Kalasatama translates to: Fish Harbour.  As in many Western cities, however, devoting a large portion of the city centre to something as grimy and unattractive as fishing was deemed undesirable, and they were turfed out to the suburbs in 2008.  What was left behind was acres of prime real estate with metro tracks sweeping across the top.

The city had always planned on building a station here, right back to the sixties when the metro was being planned, but they didn't want to construct anything until passenger numbers would justify it.  An offer to pay a third of the costs from a developer came in handy though, and so Kalasatama opened in 2007. 

It's unique among all the Helsinki Metro stations for featuring two platforms on opposite sides of the track, instead of an island; this came about because it was the easiest way to construct a station around the existing bridge.  It's futuristic and glassy but also a little bland.  It looks like more or less any 21st century metro station in the world, as opposed to the distinctive looks on the Länsimetro.

Now I just had to get out of the damn thing.  Since it opened, a shopping centre had been constructed around the station, and I wandered into empty corridors of closed stores.  It was early Sunday morning, my third day of exploring the network, and most of the city was still asleep.  

I can't help thinking that if you have to paint bright orange lines on the floor to guide people to and from the metro, your wayfinding system could do with some work.  Especially when those lines cross over one another. 

After some fruitless wandering, that no doubt caught the attention of the CCTV monitors, I managed to find an exit to the street below.  Around me were cubes of new apartment blocks, massed rather than tall, each one with its own quirky exterior to try and break up the monotony of a district built en masse.  The supermarket didn't open until eleven; the e-scooters were abandoned on the side of the road after Saturday debauchery. 

I walked down towards the waterside, but it wasn't a beautiful stroll by the bay; there were building works everywhere.  Temporary diversions and rough footpaths guided me around to the underside of the bridges.  I knew there was a way up to the crossing, somewhere, but I couldn't seem to find it.  It wasn't a great start to my day, getting lost and disoriented for a second time in ten minutes.

I finally spotted the ramp up to the carriageway in the distance, unsignposted, and crossed the acres of concrete to get to it.  There didn't seem to be a legitimate way to get there so, what the heck.  I walked up the shallow ramp - mainly an access route for cyclists - and found myself on the road bridge with the metro to my left and the cars to my right.

Up here there was a small breeze over the water, just a little, enough to break the stillness of the hot morning.  It was another scorcher.  Annoyingly, the UK was also having a heatwave; when I'm out of the country I want everyone in England to be rained upon so I can sweep back in with a tan and make them resent me.  I wandered across the bridge, then down the off-ramp to a small backroad on the island of Kulosaari. 

The houses hid away from the road, down side paths, along cul-de-sacs, descending to berths on the water where speedboats idled.  Trees guarded them from view but there was still an openness around what were no doubt very expensive properties; no high walls or electric gates to guard the homes.

Sometimes a cyclist would pass but for the main I had the street to myself.  Helsinki hadn't yet dragged itself out of bed, because Helsinki could look at all this any time it wanted.  It wasn't some idiotic Englishman running out of time. 

Kulosaari station appeared on my right, another above ground station, and perhaps the ugliest street presence of all the ones I'd visited.  They'd all had a building of sorts, or something to attract the eye, but Kulosaari hid under the bridge with only the smallest of signs to attract your attention.  I'd passed a couple of signs with a blue P+Metro, telling me how many empty spaces there were at the station.  I guess park and rides are as inauspicious in Finland as they are in the UK.

On the platform though, it was almost idyllic.  Thick banks of trees ran either side of the viaduct, held back by cool blue glass, making me feel that we were surrounded by nature.   

I boarded the train and rode one stop to the next station.  I realise that I've not really talked about the trains on the Metro.  I've always said I'm not a train person, I'm a train station person, but I suppose I should say something about the vehicles.  They're largely big and square, bright red in colour so distinctive, but they are unfortunately constructed with some incredibly uncomfortable plastic seats.  I will never be a true lover of European railway networks until they learn to embrace the moquette.

They are very modern, with next station indicators and LED screens to show you adverts and the weather and news reports.  One thing that amused me was a smog map; as you'd expect for a relatively small city in Scandinavia, these seemed to show "zero" every single day.  There was also that damn girl for Save the Children, and an odd looking man with a microphone who I thought was probably a vanity promotion like that Angelyne woman in Los Angeles, but who turned out to be a road safety ad, somehow.  It was also through these screens that I learned that Helsinki's newspaper, the Helsingin Sanomat, uses a much groovier font for its logo than it really needs to.

I start talking about the trains and end up wanging on about a font.  This is why I don't get invited on telly to talk about the railways; I know absolutely nothing, and worse, I'm quite happy that way. 

Herttoniemi station was another one undergoing refurbishment work, though, as you can see from the somewhat battered pipework in that picture, it needed it.  The station opened on the original stretch of line in 1982 and was showing its age.

It was a dark station, buried under a bus interchange and no great looker, and I was unsurprised to learn that it's scheduled to get a new building and oversite development at some point in the near future.  It was also my penultimate stop. 

For the first time on my trip I entered the world of quiet, moneyed suburbs.  In Espoo and at the eastern extremes, the Metro had swung between high-rise estates and the richest islands; in the city centre I'd moved among dense historic streets.  Now I was turning onto single carriageway curved roads, rising up and down hills, packed with trees and small homes.

I was, I have to admit, feeling a little deflated.  My Day One enthusiasm in Helsinki meant that I'd used up the Metro in a quick burst.  I should've made it last - I should've stuck to my plans, in fact - and instead I'd eaten it all up in one go.  That lead to the inevitable hangover on Day Two and the feeling of inadequacy on Day Three. 

For all my bleating about Stockholm's 100 Tunnelbana stations being too much last year, it kept me busy and never stopped being interesting.  It turns out thirty stations is too few for me.  What I really need is something in between the two, or, alternatively, more time to really explore the larger networks.  I've got the bug though.  Three years of traveling across foreign cities has made me want more.  Ankara?  Mexico City?  Sydney?  Who knows where it'll be next?

(As I typed that, the National Lottery app flashed up a little alert on my phone encouraging me to play and folks, that's the only chance I have to ever experience the Sydney Metro). 

They're not big on pavements in Helsinki's winding 'burbs, but it didn't matter; I saw hardly any cars.  One house had its door open, while refurbishment works went on inside, the owners already covered in concrete dust.  Round a corner, the distinctive smell of cinnamon drifted from someone's breakfast, filling the street.  It seemed the ideal way to live.  

I stepped off the road and into a small, dark copse of trees, descending down the hillside.  In the distance I could see a car park and, beside it, the long flat shape of my final Helsinki Metro station.  I stopped at the R-Kiosk and bought myself a Coke then rode the escalators to the platform.

Siilitie was refurbished a decade ago and still felt new and cared for.  It was better than Kalasatama's bland glass and steel though, with interesting use of concrete, and a big circular vent in the ceiling.

I'm probably the only person who looked at that and thought "that really reminds me of the tarantula room in Dr No" but you never know; perhaps there's someone in Finland as sad as me.  I took a seat on the bench and waited for my train.  The Helsinki Metro was done; it belonged to me.  I was happy.