If it had been possible for you to come here, you might have taken a flight to Helsinki, our capital city, and continued your journey by train all the way to Lappeenranta. Helsinki might have offered you your first glimpse of this country.

Now that you are not here, you will have to be content with our first speaker: an American travel vlogger on the YouTube video below, who is standing in front of Helsinki Cathedral. He's more than happy to fill you in with necessary information about this country to help you avoid the most immediate cultural bumps. He probably knows what he is talking about, as he first came to this country decades ago as a high school exchange student:

If you had taken the final leg of your journey here by train, you might have seen something of downtown Helsinki if you had chosen to embark on the eastbound train at Helsinki Central. It would also have been possible to board the same train at Tikkurila Station, but then you would have missed the downtown. The journey from Helsinki to Lappeenranta would have taken something like two and a half hours. And the arrival here - well, it might have looked like this:

Surprisingly enough, it might even have been possible for you to fly all the way to Lappeenranta. Ryanair runs a regular service from here to a variety of European airports in Germany, Italy, Austria, and Hungary. And then your arrival might have looked something like this:

If you had managed to get a window seat, you would probably have been struck by the extensive forests that cover most of this country. They have always been here, providing shelter and wealth in the form of commodities to be sold on the world market - from the tar we once sold to the emerging European naval powers to the nanogel we now wish to sell to the world's pharmaceutical community: