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I want to see Grand Forks as I can meet the parents of my other 0.5 on that trip, and that is what matters. :)

I’ve always wanted to go to China … and in train, leaving from Helsinki … it will need a few good friends that you will not get tired of when you’ll have to spend a week with them, offline, on the same cabin.

College Station has the world’s highest beer consumption per capita. And to a big degree because of this place.
It’s wonderfully studently looking and got a lot of cheap (student priced) drinks and a lot of students and locals around.

If you ever get homesick or miss Texas go there. Texan food, nice decoration and the best Margaritas of Estonia!

This bookstore has the best selection of English books in Helsinki.

If you end up traveling around Joensuu or Kuopio, it’s worth a look. It’s got nice landscapes that the Finns define as their national scenery – you can see far… big lakes, trees, big hills, very old rocks… there is a visitor center with a cafe there as well so you don’t have to bring in your own snacks for the picnic.
Beautiful seasons to see it : winter with snow, spring when there is something green already, early summer, and autumn when leaves turn to wild colors (around september-october?).

Castroreale is a small village close to Milazzo and Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto.
It has old nice buildings, a beautiful piazza, a hostel that was built by Federico II, the king of Sicily in the 13th century.
The piazza has a beautiful view over the Eolie Islands, and the people are friendly especially if you speak at all the language.
Best enjoyed with a car, and with a lot of time for exploring all these tiny cities and villages that are still unspoiled by the tourists.

Milazzo is a small beautiful city on the north coast of Messina, towards Palermo.
You can take the ferry to Eolie Islands from here.
The harbour is beautiful, and there is a beautiful castle and stairs, and some beautiful small scale streets that are nice to browse.
The city is well kept, and has a lot of tourists heading to Eolie Islands between May and September.

This is a small, 1600 people ‘city’ that is hard to be found, and that doesn’t have many tourists around (mostly people with relatives and friends in the area visit it).
If you want to see a village with just the piazza, with the old people chatting on the streets, nothing hugely big and monumental to attract the tourists for this particular village, this is it. If you just end up browsing the roads around Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, have a coffee and a cornetto in a bar, enjoy the landscapes and the people, find the ‘arco di Carmelo’ (the oldest piece of construction remaining in the village) and continue to somewhere nice, like Eolie Islands, Castroreale, Taormina etc.

Federico II, the king of the Sicilies in the 13th century, built this as his hunting place in Apulia. Despite the name (castel) it isn’t a castle as it does not have the protection built in as the castles would have.
All the doors open on the way to welcome, or opened when it wasn’t just the remains of the building. This building is definitely on my top 10 buildings to visit around the world. The building has been there from the 13th century, it has seen so much around it. There are a lot of interesting theories and conspiracies about the details of this building.