Ok as a (amateur) blogger, I totally failed this one 😐
I meant…not updating my blog for 4 months is one thing, but about this entry…even I myself can’t believe I postponed it for nearly a year!
So here it is, my trip to Northern Europe in winter 2014…ok at least Part 1 😛
Like many people, I had a lot of little fantasies when I was a little girl. Except unlike most of the people, I brought many of them with me as I grew up–and I guess that’s why sometimes people (especially my coworkers I’d assume lol) see me as a weirdo bouncing back and forth between a 30 year old professional in the financial industry and a 5 year old girl that still loves Rainbow Brite and Care Bears.
And among my little fantasies, one of the bigger ones is to meet the Santa Claus.
And that was what I decided to do last year, go find Santa in the North Pole.
If you know me well, you’d probably know that I am a very easy-going travel buddy to take trips with (except I cannot stand snores). You’d also know that I am not the best trip planner in the world. I would buy my ticket, book my hotel, pack my suitcase and think about the rest until I get to my destination. I was very fortunate to have the most well-prepared and also very easy-going girl Sylvia to be my traveling buddy to Northern Europe this time.
→Yup that’s the girl, who constantly checked for our next move 🙂
For those of you who are interested about Santa, the Santa Claus Village is located in Rovaniemi, Finland.
Rovaniemi is a city that falls in Finland’s northernmost province Lapland.
Since there’s no direct flight from Tokyo to Rovaniemi, we decided to fly to Helsinki and take the overnight Santa Express to Rovaniemi.
Despite the whole trip from Tokyo to Rovaniemi was fairly smooth and comfortable, it was some kind of trip you probably wouldn’t want to do every year as you get older. It takes about 10 hours to fly from Tokyo to Helsinki, and another 10 to 12 hours train ride from Helsinki to Rovaniemi. For us, it took pretty much 24 hours from Narita to our hotel in Rovaniemi. And if you ask me to sum up the commuting part of our trip, I can only tell you…it involved a lot of sleeping 😛
Like…
I slept.
She slept.
We slept.
But let me just say, if you have never been to Northern Europe and if you have those little girls’ bubbly fantasies, a trip like this is definitely worth it once in a life time.
I meant, I already fall in love with this beautiful little city even before we reached the Santa Claus Village!
We stayed at Hotel Pohjanhovi, and I guess the best thing I liked about the hotel was…sausages!!!
To be fair, they are not the best sausages in the world but I definitely did not expect the sausages in Rovaniemi to be my kind of sausages… 😀
But of course, nothing beats my excitement when I arrived the Santa Claus Village.
It was literally like…a fantasy land!
…except with a lot of people
Unsurprisingly, you will have to wait…like for quite a while, if you wish to see the Santa during Christmas season. But of course we waited…after all that was the whole point for us to travel all the way to the North Pole 😛 But after nearly a hour of waiting, Mr. Santa destroyed my little fantasy bubble a few seconds later after we started our conversation.
“Where are you girls from?” the soft and kind voice as I have imagined.
“Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia.”
“Oh…to friends from Japan I say konnichiwa…”
I barely remembered anything he said after that. Santa was not supposed to speak anything other than English!!! (Obviously the little 5 year old Ami was deeply brainwashed by all the Hollywood Christmas movies )
So if you ask me now if I still believe that Santa exists, I’ll tell you that maybe…but definitely not the one in Rovaniemi lol
Nonetheless, it was a great childhood dream come true moment there 🙂
In addition to visiting the Santa, there are quite a few things you can do in the Santa Village, like…
Writing an endless amount of postcards to families and friends (I even wrote one to myself) until you can’t feel your wrist anymore.
*And your postcard gets stamped with a pretty cool postmark ONLY if you mail it out from the Santa Claus Post Office :O →
Getting one of the coolest stamps to show that you have come to the Arctic Circle on your passport.
Checking out igloo bar and igloo hotel.
Or, my favorite…
Go on a reindeer sleigh ride♡ Seriously, it is a very mild and relaxing ride into the white forest…totally recommend and make sure you plan early and make a reservation if you wish to go for the 3000m ride to go further down into the snowy and magical forest 🙂
Outside of the Santa Claus Village, we also visited the well-known most northern McDonald’s in the world.
(Yup I know…it’s just a McDonald’s. A pretty small one too. But make sure you ask the counter for some postcards…I guess it’s pretty special because not everyone can make it this far just to eat some french fries or chicken sandwich :P)
The Arctic Museum
We stayed in Rovaniemi for 3 days, which was just perfect to enjoy a bit of everything in this beautiful little city.
By the way this was only about the first 4 days of our trip. After Rovaniemi we then hopped onto our train and headed back to Helsinki where we spent a cozy Christmas before we took off to Norway. Obviously if you have read this far, you can probably tell that I am FAR from a good travel blogger. But I hope you got some glimpse of what a fun (and cold for sure) little adventure you can have in Rovaniemi if you are also kind of a fan of Santa (like me) but too shy to admit it 🙂
Will try to continue sharing about the rest of our adventure…hopefully very soon! :X