One day in Finland and I already feel like I’ve come home to an old friend, even if we are both a little older and wiser. Catching a tram through Helsinki with a gaggle of international journalists, all chatting in a score of languages about current affairs, was as stimulating as the first time I tried it, back on the Foreign Correspondent’s Programme in 2010. It was also a little bittersweet ...
Author: Sian Lewis
Sian is an award-winning freelance travel and outdoors journalist, video producer and presenter. She has a regular column in The Independent covering adventure travel, and edits a popular blog, The Girl Outdoors, which has won UK’s Travel Blog of the Year and Outdoor Blog of the Year 2015. Sian has previously worked as a writer for BBC Countryfile and photography magazine Digital Camera, as well as a freelance writer for The Sunday Times Travel, Lonely Planet magazine and The Guardian. She has also created online travel content, photography and video campaigns for destinations including the Swiss and Greek Tourism Boards, Tirol region and Visit Wales. She took part to the Foreign Correspondence Programme in 2011. She has studied International Studies at Bath University and has a Masters in Magazine Journalism from the Cardiff Journalism School.
“The month I spent in Finland was one of the happiest of my life and underlined my ambition to be journalist. Five years later I’m successful travel writer and am still close friends with many of the international young people I met during FCP.”
The key to a happy life
It’s been five years since I first visited Finland and I haven’t stopped talking about this wonderful place since, but it’s only now that I am poised to return that I’ve sat down to think about why I was so entranced by this country of deep snow and endless summers, of moomins and Marimekko, which strikes me as a country where its inhabitants seem to have figured out the ...