May 7-13

By Bill - June 22, 2018

May 7th -May 9 We went to Helsinki, Finland via Moscow, to get Russian visas. We also had 5 other passports that needed visa for the young volunteers. We had a 2 hour layover in Moscow. I bought a Nesting Christmas Tree in on of the shops. Then we had a 2 1/2 hour flight to Helsinki. We were served fish sandwiches on the flight. (Gross, no thank you) A person met us after we got off the plane and took them to the US Embassy. We had a taxi drive us to The Temple area. Not many places where you take a new Mercedes S 560 taxi to and from the airport. We stayed in the Temple guesthouse. The room was for families and would have slept 6-8 people; it also had a kitchen. We walked to a German grocery store. I found Licorice! Yahoo! We got some breakfast foods, fruit and milk. The next day we were able to attend a Temple session. It was a special gift to be able to attend. We asked the guesthouse person how to get down to the Market Place. He told us how to catch a bus to the train station that would take us there. The bus ride was interesting as we saw parts of the city we hadn't seen before. The train ride was great. On a marquee it showed each stop and where we figured we needed to get off. We walked around and found a pharmacy where we could get some Ibuprofen. It was very expensive. Actually everything we bought in Helsinki was expensive. We walked down some cobble streets. We saw a huge White Cathedral. We didn't go inside. Then we walked down some more streets to get down by the water and toured the market place. It was tents and venders. I got a bag to carry stuff in. Our bus and train tickets let us take a ferry over to Fortress island. It was a windy and cold day on the water. The island was empty of a lot of people because of it being off season. There was a small market and a church. It used to be a military type base. We walked all around then got back on the ferry to the main land. We walked back to the train station and caught it back up to where we caught the first one. We got on a bus that we thought was the right one to take us back up to the Temple. Wrong bus. It took us close but not where we needed to go. After we had gone the whole route, the driver was at the end of his shift. he got permission to drop us off at the right place. Whew!
The next day we lounged around until it was time to get a taxi to the airport. We walked around the shops at the airport and bought some chocolate. We flew to Moscow where we had a 5 1/2 hour layover. We flew into Almaty. We got a cab at the airport to take us to the hotel. The driver charged us 10,000 Tinge. He ripped us off. We had passports to give to the Taylor's so we walked to their apartment. We walked to the mall. We had lunch then went into GalMart in the mall. We walked back to the hotel to take a nap and wait for Nurzia to take us to the airport.