Wednesday, 9 August 2017
First days at World Science Fiction Conventions are normally ones of barely controlled chaos. It's just the standard way of things. If you're attending a worldcon in a city that has held one before then you can pretty much assume that they'll have all the registration procedures down pat. But if it is a new place you you get a bit worried about queues, waiting, more queues, and a lack of information. Those of us who have been through all this a few times aim to get to the registration desk on the day before opening when the committee have set up and are running through the whole system testing it on the willing participants, like us, who show up early. This convention decided against that approach, for whatever reason, and announced that they would only open the desks at 6pm on the Tuesday for a couple of hours.
We decided we would rather go to dinner.
The convention center is some 5 minutes by train (or about 45 minutes by tram) from the city center, with a 5 minute walk at each end. So with a New Zealand friend acting as local guide we headed off to the train station at about 8:45am and made it to the con site about 30 minutes later. Either Finnish fans get up late or the registration system was working better than I expected. In any event we made it through in near record time.
So, with registration bags in hand (including a 5 day metro pass which was a nice touch), we just pottered around the convention site chatting with various people (Robin Johnson and Mark Linneman in matching mobies, Charles and Nicolette Taylor) we hadn't seen in 7 or 10 years, or longer.
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| Vince Docherty and Perry (photo: Renee Sieber) |
Robyn lasted until lunch time before deciding to head off doing her touristy stuff in Helsinki and before long I found myself sitting having a beer with Rose Mitchell and the Harveys while people wandered past and dropped over to say hello. A very pleasant afternoon was spent doing very little before I decided that the beer and my feet were getting to me so I headed back to the hotel to get ready for that night's dinner.
Robyn had become slightly fixated on dinner cruises before we left Melbourne; we'd taken one in Stockholm, and she was desperate for another in Helsinki. I'd booked for 11 before we left home and with Simon Litten from NZ tagging along we got to 12 (a mixture of Melbourne, Perth, NZ, UK and now French based fans). We walked and trammed down to the harbour for a 7pm start time and had a great evening watching the world and water go by as we had a Finnish buffet dinner.
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| Waiting for a tram (from left: Doug Raxworthy, Mark Plummer John Harvey, Claire Briarley, Andrew O'Rorke, Rose Mitchell, Robyn, Eve Harvey) |
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| Harbour cruise boat |
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| John Harvey, Dave Luckett and Sally Beasley |
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| Doug, Eve and Rose |
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| Perry wants a beer |
An excellent evening was had by all. We were back at the pier at 9pm, and back at the local bar behind the hotel at about 9:30pm. Time for one, or maybe it was two, and then off to bed.
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