The Fosters Take Finland

I had to give a presentation in Seinäjoki yesterday. It's about a 4-hour drive from Mikkeli if you go direct, but we decided to take a longer route so we could pass through Tampere, where the Moomin Museum is. If you're unfamiliar with the Moomin family, google it. I never read these books as a child, but our friends introduced them to our kids. They're cute books, and the story of their creator, Tove Jansson, is really interesting too (there's a movie about her called Tove that is worth a watch). The museum was magical. It was almost entirely dark in the exhibit rooms, and the exhibits themselves--many of them dioramas made by Tove and her partner, Tuulikki--were illuminated. Everybody in the museum was moving through it quietly, or sitting in chairs (such as the bean bag chairs made to look like boulders). There was a workshop where kids of all ages were encouraged to make a Moomin house out of paper. The girls spent about an hour working on those, before ransacking ...

Day two in Paris didn't let us down. We went to bed with a plan to beat everybody else to the Eiffel Tower but we failed to do that; between sleeping a little late, enjoying too many pain au chocolat, taking a detour to admire a farmer's market (where a cheese monger told me my french was perfect--now I'm really insufferable) to buy soft cheese and dried apricots and figs, and the fact that the tower was a 2 hour walk from our hotel anyway, we got there after 11am. By that time the lines were already snaking around themselves, and my attempt to buy tickets online with their buggy system got me locked out of my credit card, so we were left no choice but to wait. We opted to climb the 660 stairs to the second floor (you can take the stairs or an elevator that far, and then the summit, which none of us was remotely interested in ascending to, is only accessible by elevator). One kid and one adult have a healthy fear of heights and at least one of them couldn't get out of ...

On our last day in Edinburgh the kids visited the pool one more time (intensifying the rash it gave Alice on her face), we hit up the National Museum of Scotland (whaddup, Dolly the sheep?) and had a nice sunny picnic in The Meadows before trying every piece of playground equipment within a 1km radius. Then we hopped an EasyJet flight to Paris, narrowly avoided the scam taxis at CDG airport, and landed at our hotel around 10pm. There was still time to nip out and grab a 4 euro bottle of wine and some chocolate eclairs from a patisserie before things closed (do they close?); there was time to marvel at the novelty of being able to get a really good quality baked good so late, and of buying wine at a regular food store, and of having the shop attendant offer to open the wine for you because your hotel room probably doesn't have a wine opener. Within an hour, Brian and I understood the hype about Paris, a city we resisted for so long, for no good reason. There is a real "f$#&...