EuroBillTracker

We'll have dinner in Restaurant Zetor on Saturday at 19:00. This is our menu for the evening:

• Salad with cold-smoked roast of reindeer
• Minute steak, Väinös potatoes, garlic butter and warm tomato-onion salad
• Poor Knights

If this menu isn't suitable for you for some reason (vegetarian etc), please contact me so we can make the appropriate arrangements in advance.

For all participants of EBTM05. Please remember to write in the commentfield "EBTM05" for every bill that you receive during the event. Preferable you should only bring 5-ers to the event.

Some information that every EBTM05 participant should know:

First of all, you should read my previous message about the subject. Please note that the meeting time for Friday is 18:00. There was a small discrepancy in my original message -- both the 18:00 and 19:00 times were mentioned, but 18:00 is the correct one. It's advised to check in to your place of stay (hotel, hostel, another EBTer) during the morning or afternoon, so you won't need to carry your things around during the evening. Friday afternoon (before the meeting) is also a good opportunity to get some Finnish notes from shops etc.

We'll meet at the railway station, the red arrow points to the exact location. The meeting place is the western entrance of the railway station (inside the station). More maps can be found from the City of Helsinki map pages.



For those of you who haven't seen the railway station yet, here are some pictures which you may use when navigating to the meeting place (seen in the last picture). Click on the thumbnails for larger pictures.



You'll recognize me from my red t-shirt, there will also be some kind of a "EBTM" banner somewhere nearby.

When all the participants are present, we'll proceed to a nearby bar/restaurant called Sports Academy which is right across the street from the railway station. If you have a look at the above map, the place can be found a bit south from the railway station, right where the "M" (metro) symbol can be seen on the map. Here's a picture of Sports Academy:



From there we'll proceed to a short sightseeing trip in central Helsinki, within walking distance from the railway station.

On Saturday, we'll meet again at the railway station at 10:00 and then visit the Bank of Finland museum (at 11) and Suomenlinna. When we're back on the mainland from Suomenlinna, we'll have a traditional Helsinki sightseeing trip using the 3T tram as our main method of transportation. We'll stop every now and then to have a closer look at some of the attractions. Later on in the evening we'll have dinner in a restaurant, the menu can be seen above. If this menu is not suitable for you for some reason, please let me know immediately because I need to make the final reservation to the restaurant on Monday.

The group will split to smaller groups on Sunday depending on your own interests. You may either a) start your trip back to home, b) spend some time in Helsinki on your own or c) join one of the special interest groups. You'll be informed about these opportunities in the meeting at the latest. Some people have expressed interest in finding a few Geocaches on Sunday, some of you may be interested in visiting the largest shopping mall in the Nordic countries etc.

As I mentioned earlier, 20€ will be collected from all the participants to cover some of the costs. This payment will cover the admission costs, local traffic (tram, ferry, buses, metro) on Saturday, the pizza in Suomenlinna and the food in Zetor. What's not included in the sum are the drinks in those places (and possibly elsewhere) and other meals (such as breakfasts and if you want to have something to eat in Sports Academy on Friday) and transportation on Friday or Sunday.

If you are going to purchase a 3-day traveller's ticket from HKL, you probably won't need the 1-day ticket for Saturday. If you're planning to buy the 3-day traveller's ticket, please let me know so I won't buy too many tickets. I'll probably buy the tickets on Thursday, so if you don't need a ticket for Saturday, let me know about it on Wednesday at the latest. You'll also get a 5€ discount from the 20€ payment in this case. This also applies to those people living in Helsinki who use their own "Matkakortti" during the meeting.

The tickets will be given to you on Friday evening (or Saturday morning, depending on when you arrive to Helsinki) but they'll be valid only on Saturday.

Please make sure your data is correct in the Who will come and who will not topic. If it's not, post a message and Mr Euro will fix the list accordingly.

I have now made the final reservation to Restaurant Zetor.

If you followed the IAAF games last week, you must have noticed the weather -- it was downright horrible, with thunderstorms and heavy rain. Now that the games have ended, the weather has turned substantially better. However, please be prepared for possible showers as we're outdoors quite a bit during the weekend. Having an umbrella with you might be a good idea, just in case. Here's the 5-day forecast for Helsinki, so far it's looking good.

http://www.weeronline.nl/Finland/Helsinki.htm

Here you have a 6 day-forecast - also looks great.

I would like to adapt my out of office assistant to the event. Could anyone please give me a Finnish translation for the following:

"I'm currently out of the office. I will be back on tuesday 23rd august."

Mr Euro wrote:I would like to adapt my out of office assistant to the event. Could anyone please give me a Finnish translation for the following:

"I'm currently out of the office. I will be back on tuesday 23rd august."

Olen matkoilla, palaan tiistaina 23. elokuuta.

Hey,

I will be arriving at Helsinki Airport Friday at 13h05. What is the best and cheapest way to get to the city center and my hotel? The hotel is Hotel Anna, Annakatu 1 00120 Helsinki

Thanks for helping me out!!

That would be the airport bus #615. Very frequent service, gets you right downtown. The ticket costs 3,40 and is valid in the area in all public transport 80 minutes from the moment of purchase. You can then take a taxi, bus or a tram from the railway station to your destination.

There's also a faster Finnair airport shuttle bus, but that costs 5 euros if I'm right and it doesn't include any further (public) transportation from the downtown terminal.

We have an excellent web service in the capital area for these kinds of queries, called "the Journey Planner". Mr Euro, take a look at this link to see the schedule for your route beginning at about 2 pm from the airport.
The journey planner main page is here: http://aikataulut.ytv.fi/reittiopas/en/

Osku was a bit quicker than me, but I replied to your message in this topic.

Surprise surprise, we reached mostly the same conclusion, with the exception that Osku had chosen the "Least walking" option and I chose the defaults. Either way works, of course.

Greetings from Stockholm

We´re going to enjoy one more day Stockholm, Viking Line will take us to Turku tonight.

I don't know if it's possible, but can we go to Tampere on sunday with some people who like dots and hits?

There is room for three persons in my car.. we are driving back to Tampere sunday (not sure about the time)..

For those of you who attend the meeting and can browse the forum during your stay in Helsinki, here are some reminders about the plans for Sunday. This information is essentially the same that I told you in the meeting, but just to make sure..

First of all, we'll have a presentation from Antti Lauri, who has developed a scientific model for the diffusion of euro banknotes and coins. We'll meet at our usual meeting place at the railway station at 12:00 and then walk to a place that's more suitable for giving that presentation. We'll leave the meeting place at 12:05 at the latest, so if you'd like to join us, please be on time.

Another thing, we'll make a visit to Itäkeskus, the biggest enclosed shopping centre in the Nordic Countries. That by itself may not be that interesting, but dot hunters should be aware that this isn't in the same dot as the central Helsinki dot. So, if you get a note from here, you'll get a nice new dot on your map. The postal code for Itäkeskus is 00930 Helsinki. We'll meet at our usual meeting place at the railway station at 13:00 and then proceed to Itäkeskus with metro. If you don't have a ticket for the metro yet, don't worry, we'll help you to purchase the required ticket from the station. We'll leave the meeting place at 13:05 at the latest, so if you'd like to join us, please be on time.

The events are arranged so that it's possible to watch the presentation and then go back to the railway station for the trip to Itäkeskus. You can also join only one of these activities if you like.

If you want something to do before noon, you might want to visit Kiasma, the museum of modern arts. It opens its doors at 10 (sorry, I told you in the meeting that it'd open at 9, but that information was incorrect).

Feel free to join these events if you wish, let's make the last day of the meeting as enjoyable as the previous days have been