Saturday, May 10

My birthday card from Naa had told me that I had to be standing outside the house by the rubbish bin at 11:00, dressed properly and waiting from someone. So, after a surprisingly small Saturday breakfast, I got dressed and stood outside. At 11:02 Naa came out of the house and told me that she was the “someone”, and off we went.

My birthday treat was to consist of a lunch and a visit to the cinema. We got off the metro at Kaisaniemi and I waited while Naa disappeared into the cinema and came out three minutes later clutching tickets which she refused to show me. We then walked down past the railway station, where a tourist handed me his very expensive phone and asked me to take a panoramic photograph of the square that included him.

We walked past Stockmann towards Kamppi until we stopped outside Happy Food Garden, a restaurant that Naa and Roosa apparently know well. It had a huge Chinese buffet that included sushi. Naa paid and we settled down to eat. Naa concentrated mainly on sushi, of which she had about twenty, while I had a few sushi, some soup, and platefuls of the fish and chicken main courses. The red curry was especially noteworthy.

We spent over an hour eating and drank about two litres of water while we were doing it.

After leaving the restaurant Naa announced we were too early so we took a detour to Fennica Records, which I haven’t visited for about a year. It had disappeared (again). I made a note to check their website at some point in the near future to find out where they have landed.

Now we are in Aleksi walking back to Kaisaniemi. We are watching a man playing bottles, accompanied by a man with a puppet of a pianist. Naa remembers them from previous summers and I think I do too.

The film we will see is The Amazing Spiderman 2, in English in 2D. It will be surprisingly good. Not only is the cgi everything you might expect, but it also has a story that comes complete with morals about growing up, friendship, the consequences of making choices, and the need to accept the outcomes of them. And it has a very surprising death in it.

We will get home about 18:30 after a really nice day out, for which I will be very thankful. It felt strange to be sitting in “one of Naa’s favourite restaurants”, talking like adults, but strange in a very good way.

We will spend the entire rest of the evening and much of the night watching the Eurovision Song Contest from start to finish. Austria will win with their bearded drag act, proving that you will never run out of ways to be “controversial” if you look hard enough; and Finland will get eleventh place.