Turkish Summer: Part One

We've had a nice summer.
We began with our trip through the ruins and finished that one off with a road trip along the Turquoise Coast, from Marmaris to Kas, stopping and camping and floating in the Mediterranean. We found awesome camping areas, gorgeous beaches, and cute towns. That whole week looked a lot like this:

Then it was time for our trip to Finland for the Ruisrock festival. We had a day on either end in Helsinki and we loved it. The farmhouses, the bikes, the beers, the farmers' markets, the trees, trees, trees!

Look! It's Tayfun Bey on some random island off Helsinki! Tayfun was the Turkish principal at our high school this past year. Small world, right?

The festival was great fun too--and certainly the most "civilized" music festival we've ever been to. It was very European with their sit-down dinners, tap water, and champagne spots. The light was crazy too. The sun finally "set" at about 11:30 at night, and it was twilight until about 2:00 am when the sun started to "come up" again.

The venue was on a beautiful island that we all had to walk 2km to access. The best stage, where we saw Rise Against, Anti-Flag and Flogging Molly was right on the beach. The weather gorgeous, but really hot. Hotter than we expected. For Anti-Flag, I got a hose-down from the nice guy with the ear-muffs. We were able to get right in front for all our favorite bands.

The people-watching was almost as much fun at the festival as the bands. It was too funny--on Saturday, everyone was falling down drunk. I mean, these people are practically Russian, right? and they are slamming vodka like it's water. What's funny is that the falling-down-public-drunkenness is kind of embraced. I mean you can be blitzed and the bar will keep serving you. There were no fights, no scuffles, just a lot of happy drunks, and this was a punk/metal festival. But of course, by Sunday, the heat and booze had gotten to everyone and we saw a lot of this:

I was just happy to see that they're human after all. Seriously I've never seen so many people drinking the way the Fins were on Saturday at the show. I wondered if they had the stamina to continue. They didn't. Sunday was way more low-key.

We were a little reluctant to leave Finland. We had such a great time there and really loved the city. I don't think it will ever make it on the "list" because there's no mountains. But we would now possibly consider Oslo, Norway. Thoughts?