Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

After returning to the hotel with our purchases, Lisa and I stopped to have one of the sodas we bought and rest our feet. I checked messages and saw on Facebook that Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley were back in their hotel room as of only an hour earlier. I called Kevin and asked if they would like to meet for lunch, and they agreed, so we collected our things and headed back downtown.

A second reason for going back to the hotel was that I had a poster tube with the small vinyl WSFS banner (made by Sasquan) that hangs from the front of the Business Meeting table with me, and I wanted to mail it home rather than somehow try to fit it into my already overloaded luggage. The post office is downtown between the train station and the Sokos hotel where Kevin and Andy were staying, so this worked out well. The trains are running again, and there were no queues at the post office, so we managed to connect with K&A roughly on time to head off on a Viking Expedition.

( We're Gonna Starve! )

After lunch, we bade K&A goodbye because we were aiming for one more hobby shop for Lisa to look for trains. It was a longer walk than I thought it would be, partially because I rather unnecessarily went up and down hills getting there. We didn't find anything Lisa wanted to get, but we found yet another person who described herself as a "con-goer" who had known about Worldcon but had not gone. We told her that Worldcon would be in Dublin in two years and she sounded interested.

Given our location, we took the opportunity to ride the Helsinki Metro. Because Cheryl's friend Otto gave us a lift from the ferry terminal when we arrived and our other trips didn't take us along the axis of the Metro, we'd never had a chance to sample it. This was more of a joy-ride, but when you've bought a multi-day unlimited transit pass, you have the ability to hop on and off systems like this.

( On the Metro )

An afterthought from this morning: We had an interesting piece of equipment follow us down the tram tracks when we first set out for our first round of tourism and shopping.

( A Tidy System is a Safe System )

After a brief recovery time in the hotel (and a final short grocery stop for a snack for tonight and for tomorrow morning), Lisa remembered something she had seen in Stockmann's department store downtown, so we made one final round trip downtown. I think we got good value from our transit pass.

Returning from the last trip, we threaded our way through the latest batch of tourists trying to figure out the elevators, Lisa took a bath, I composed journal entries, and we continued our packing. The alarm for tomorrow is set for 4:15 because we need to take an early train to get out to the airport for the flight to Iceland tomorrow.

We have had a wonderful time here in Helsinki. I would love to get a chance to come back here someday. Everyone was so good to us, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

I can access the executive lounge at the Hilton, which has free wi-fi. I'm not up to spending large sums for the connection in the room. I may spring for connectivity in the convention centre a couple of times; I'm not sure. And of course it depends on whether the service even lets me do so, since the mobile phone I got yesterday won't let me use a non-Australian card to recharge it. I need to go to a shop sometime today to put some minutes on it, or otherwise I can only receive calls, not make them. If you don't have an Australian credit card, you can recharge the minutes in person at certain shops, but not online using a credit card.

I did go to dinner on the Colonial Tramcar Restaurant last night, the start/end of which is a block from the Convention Centre. I had a nice steak and a blood-sugar-raising chocolate mousse that I enjoyed a great deal along with a tour of parts of Melbourne from on board the tram that has been converted to a restaurant. Now I understand one of the reasons the meal is relatively expensive: there's a bunch of alcohol included in the price: sparkling wine, dinner wine, after-dinner drinks. Not having any appreciation for the taste of alcoholic beverages, this was lost on me. But I still enjoyed myself a lot.

Knowing how streetcars work, I was not at all surprised when we reversed direction a bunch of times. The trip is not circular, but out-and-back, and requires the streetcar to change ends several times. This was disconcerting to the group sitting next to me, who kept complaining about the car "going backwards." I was sitting at one end of the car, which is all wood and mirrors and curtains and very pretty, but a couple of times one of the tram operators opened the end door (covered in mirrors), and you could see the regular tram control stand at my end of the car.

It was a great trip on the streetcar restaurant, and if I'm here in Melbourne again sometime, I might well do it again. Maybe next time I'll even spring for the late dinner, rather than the early (shorter, less expensive) early dinner. But in this case, I was happy to be on the early seating because it meant I could get to bed relatively early -- but still 4 AM by Pacific Time. I slept well and woke up on my own at 7:30, so, fingers crossed, I'll not have too much trouble adjusting to the time down here. I don't have time for jet-lag.

Having decided to leave the main tourist areas of Tokyo and instead look at the oddball stuff, we set off this morning about 10:30 to look for the Arakawa Tram Line.

( Natter about trains and trams )

Back in the hotel room after something like ten or eleven hours of trooping around Tokyo, we put together plans for tomorrow. In order to have any reasonable amount of time to explore the oddball little electric railway out at Choshi and not have to spend an inordinate amount of time on a commuter train getting there, we need to be on a 9:40 AM train out of Tokyo, plus allow enough time at Tokyo station to find a couple of JPY600 (large) lockers for our luggage. Looks like we'll be wringing lots more value from the rail passes tomorrow as we go from Tokyo to Chioshi to Tokyo to Narita, probably not getting to our hotel in which we're spending our last night in Japan until after 2130 or thereabouts.