You know you really had a great holiday when you feel hollow returning back home. Yesterday I had a severe case of Tuska blues, the sort of day where you only feel like curling into a ball and sleep. The Irish weather didn’t help much either, because as soon as we landed I was unsure whether it was Dublin or India in the monsoon season – a distinct change from the glorious Finnish sun.

The highlight of the trip was the 3 day open air metal festival - Tuska. This was my first proper festival and like all good things in life the first time is always a unique experience. We got to see loads of bands (in order of appearance):-

• Immortal
• Katatonia
• Children of Bodom
• Battlelore
• Baratrum
• Pain
• Emperor
• Finntroll
• Moonspell
• Stratovarius

All these big names at once are a dream for someone hailing from the dot but when you're in Finland, you're in Finland. Undoubtedly the best show was from Moonspell, with Pain (Peter Tagtgren solo side project) a close second. This judgment is based on the outstanding performance of these bands rather than the poor performance of the others.

The organisation of the concert was excellent with the only snag being that you weren't allowed to leave the concert grounds once you enter. This meant that on Saturday we had about 5 hours to kill because Pain played at 15.15 and Emperor only started at 20.45. It felt like being back in University having loads of free lessons. Luckily there was no shortage of beer and people watching opportunities so we sprawled ourselves on the grass drinking beer in the bar area. You weren’t allowed to drink alcohol near the stages so the "beer garden" was in a separate enclosed area only accessible to over 18's.

Pictures of the concert should follow shortly. Pictures can be found here.

Apart from the festival we also did some sightseeing and went on a pub tram which passes though Helsinki’s main sights. We were also mugged by a gang of seagulls who first swooped over my head to drop a whole ball of precious cloudberry ice cream. As if this wasn’t enough another gull repeated the aerial feat and tried to steal the remaining ice cream in the cone but only managed a 2 inch deep peck in the soft blueberry ice-cream. The same story happened to my most welcoming host, with the difference that the tugs dropped the ice cream in the sea. If you’re thinking that we were trying to be friendly with the birds, we weren’t. Actually we were furious at them. You might recall how possessive we can get with ice-cream!