Back in Berlin

We flew home on December 23rd and had to have all our presents with us.

Anticipating Christmas dinner.

There was a record amount of snow in Southern Finland: there's a plastic terrace table somewhere under there...

It made for beautiful scenery, if nothing else.

The Berlin-style brunch trend has now spread to Helsinki where all the hipsters find it the most important meal of the week. This was our New Year's brunch at Siltanen, a reasonable €12 including drinks and free refills of coffee, tea, juice and bread.

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Fine, we've been back for three days already... we landed in Berlin on Wednesday after spending almost two weeks in Finland. We are now very well fed, not-so-well rested, and slightly nostalgic about home. People who think expats get long, nice holidays when they visit their home countries are dead wrong; we run around trying to meet as many friends and family members as we can while we try to not offend anyone by not having enough time to see them. This leads to too many cups of coffee per day, too many missed phone calls and too many polite pieces of cake forced down. The only time we had to ourselves was in the evenings, and so we staid up until 4 or 5am most nights... But it's still all nice: these are the people we miss and wish we could see more, anyway.

It's nice to be back in Berlin, though, and back to reasonable prices for drinks :)