— Finland and Beyond —

August 11, 2009 – We're back in Germany after a week in Helsinki with a few very pleasurable side trips along the way. We particularly enjoyed Helsinki's beautiful architecture in the "old-city" section and its robust and tasty cuisine. I must confess that I have become a huge fan of reindeer meat, along with some other Finnish delights. (The lightly smoked reindeer steaks were astonishingly delicious.) We found Finland to be a particularly easy venue for Americans because most Finns speak English, and speak it very well.

Great Danes in Finland
Shortly after we arrived in Finland, I received a very nice email message from Anu-Liisa Aghazarian who, along with her husband Pekka Heino, owns five Great Danes in a scenic village north of Helsinki. She offered her services as a "tour guide" if we wanted to visit Helsinki's 3rd largest city, Tampere, which is located near their home north of Helsinki. On August 5 we took the train to Tampere. Anu-Liisa met us and drove us all over Tampere, showing us the city's highlights. We then went to her home in Kangasala to spend time with Pekka and the Danes. Of course, I took many photos of the dogs. Here are a few:

Missing from the line-up is 2-year-old King's Ransom Anna Alfadane, aka Anna. I took many photos of Anna but for unknown reasons my compact flash card failed before I had time to offload the pictures. I lost all my shots of Anna, along with each and every photograph I took during our tour of Tampere. Lexar's Image Rescue 3 app has been unable to recover the files. If anyone out there has had success recovering missing files on a corrupt flash card, please let me know how you did it.

More photos
You can see many more photos of each of these Danes (including Anna) by clicking on their names: Noah, Anna, Samurai, Kaisa, Hertta. Their dad, Pekka, is an excellent photographer and he has put some exceptional photos online. Both Anu-Liisa and Pekka will attend the GDCA National in Tennessee this year. I hope some of you will have a chance to meet them.

Next stop, Estonia
After visiting Anu-Liisa and Pekka we caught a train back to Helsinki. The next morning we took a ferry across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia. Estonia, formerly part of the USSR, is one of three Baltic states in Northern Europe. The other two are Latvia and Lithuania. Estonia achieved full independence from Russia through peaceful means in 1991. We were in Tallinn, Estonia's capital, for two days and loved it!