My friend
Anna gave me a challenge where you're supposed to post a picture and your readers are supposed to guess where it's taken, and then there's a bunch of questions to reply to as well. I'm sending this one on to
Elina, hopefully she hasn't done it aready.
Any guesses?
Scariest airline flown?
I haven't flown any particularly scary airlines so far, and I can't remember any particularly scary flights, either. I guess the really short flights in tiny planes (Turku-Stockholm, Turku-Helsinki) may have been a bit scarier than normal as they're usually a lot more bumpy, but nothing too scary there, either.
Favourite city/country/place?
This is a really difficult one! But as the question is formulated like that, I'm going to take advantage of it and choose one each, which isn't easy either, but I'd have to say city: London, country: Scotland, and place: the one in the picture.
Most remote corner of the globe visited?
On the bus between Sydney and Canberra, surrounded by the Australian outback, I felt like I was pretty far away, both from home and from other people in general.
Favourite guidebook series?
I think the guidebook series you start out with tends to be the one you keep using, and in my case that's Lonely Planet, although I can't really say if it's tons better than any other series.
Solo traveller or group traveller?
Although travel with a great group of friends can be amazing, it's also very difficult to get right, as you won't know how well you get on once you're out there before you actually head off. Also, I know I tend to have moments when I stress out/am grumpy/hate compromises when I spend too much time with the same people (although this doesn't apply to everyone, it's just that I won't know beforehand), so I'm quite happy to travel on my own, also because then I'm not bound by things like other people's schedules or budgets. I mean, if I'd always sat around waiting for someone else to have the time and the money to travel when I did, I wouldn't have been half the places I've been. But my favourite kind of travel is a combination of both categories - travelling on my own while visiting friends or couch surfing, or travelling with someone else but having "days off" and spending time apart as well.
Worst place to catch a stomach bug?
I've been lucky enough to avoid stomach bugs abroad so far, but during a week-long family holiday in Alanya, Turkey everyone else got sick at some point during the week. Stomach bugs are awful anywhere, but I'd say hot temperatures don't help.
First culture shock experience?
Strangely enough, the first culture shock I remember experiencing was reversed culture shock after returning from Paris after working at Disneyland one summer. It's strange, because I'd both lived in France before, and returned to Finland before, and the first time was after a whole year, so you'd think it would be worse. It was equally bad in January 2011 when I moved back from London to a dark, cold Finland and an empty flat full of my boxed-up belongings.
Where would you buy a second house?
Well, this one is hard, too. There's so many places! It would be lovely to have a home somewhere warm, so that I could escape there when the Finnish winter becomes too much, but at the same time my top 2 favourite places - London and Scotland - would probably come first, even though the weather there is only marginally better in the winter than it is here.
