Today, at the request of many, I went to McDonald's in Helsinki to see what the difference is. (Mainly: price.) Lyndsey and I both got a burger called "The 1955" burger. According to burgerbusiness.com (a website I will be visiting regularly now that I know it exists) McDonald's made up some crazy backstory about how this particular burger was invented in 19050s Chicago.

The thing was pretty much like a quarter pounder with a weird orange sauce on it. It wasn't Big Mac sauce. Burgerbusiness.com calls it barbecue sauce, but I would like to pointedly disagree. I mean I'm not a doctor or anything, but I feel pretty comfortable diagnosing what is and what is not barbecue sauce. Readers, this was NOT barbecue sauce. And it costs approximately twice what you would pay in the US. From now on if I am in the mood for a quick burger I'll just stick with a plain ol' baconhamburger.

Another Finnish misadventure: we brought quad band phones with us with the idea of getting pay-as-you-go service for them. Problem is, the phones are "locked." (I thought only Apple locked their phones?) So we had to buy new cell phones. And, as you would expect from a Finnish cell phone store, the phones are in Finnish. C'est la vie.

We found some really cool stuff, too. A little cafe/bar that does whiskey tastings, four whiskeys for seven euro, directly across the street from an awesome indoor market which is exactly like what Americans think of when they think of a small, tightly packed European market selling everything from coffee to sweets to beef tongue to fish. There were those cool little stalls with four tiny tables crammed together serving what I am going to assume was some awesome Finnish homecooking. Unfortunately we had just dropped 14 euro at McDonald's and we were feeling neither hungry nor rich (Helsinki is expensive, y'all).

Tomorrow I start my orientation. I'm super excited, and only a little bit terrified. It's suddenly dawning on me what I've gotten myself into, I think.