Tapiontori is the best — and the only — fine dining restaurant in the garden city Tapiola, nested in the southeastern corner of Espoo. The restaurant is located in one of the more subtle architectural landmarks of Tapiola, U-house. As Tapiola is quite compact, everything is in walking distance, including parking slots.

The restaurant has been carefully renovated in an old bank and the big glass windows create an illusion that you are sitting on a park. The bank heritage can be seen from here and there; for example, the wines are stored in the old vault.

The food is excellent and usually the place is packed during lunch hours and evenings. It’s best to reserve the table beforehand, especially if your party has more than two people.

www.tapiontori.com, Tapiontori 1, Espoo, Finland, +358 9 455 4011

After two months of hectic adding of reviews to the site, I’ve finally got back to the situation that there are no review backlogs anymore. Thus, I’ll assume the old style of posting one or two reviews for each post.

Hopefully I’m able to travel during the following months, as otherwise I need to start spend my money in Helsinki restaurants, bars and shops — and as you know, Finland is very expensive country. Besides, it’s more fun to find new nice shops around the world.

I also learned that I’ve already written one hundred reviews for Finland. Scoot! I still have a few of those in my back pocket, so prepare for more Finnish reviews. Maybe their number will top the US reviews in the near future — unless I get to travel to the States before christmas.

Gandy is a huge bag shop in the downtown Grenoble, quite near Galeries Lafayette department store. The store is an excellent destination for all of us that have never enough bags.

The selection is excellent, there are bags on several floors. As in most bag shops, most of the stuff is for ladies. There are also some backbags and other items that can be worn by a man, and the basement has a selection of luggage.

Gandy, 2 Rue Molière, Grenoble, France, +33 4 7646 2994

If you adore sleek male fashion items, go to Kenzo shop in Grenoble. Located on place Victor Hugo, the smallish shop has a good selection of goods from the country of the rising sun.

There are items only for man, a refreshing exception among all fashion shops that seem to cater for ladies and have a few items for gentlemen. I found the shoes especially nice, designs that have not been, at least yet, copied and found in every corner shop — thus deteriorating the whole design and the brand.

The clothes were not that much to my taste, but I can understand why people buy them. They seemed to be good quality, too.

www.kenzo.fr, Place Victor Hugo, Grenoble, France

Sergent Major is a children fashion store located in the walking district of Grenoble, near the Galeries Lafayette department store. Despite the name, the clothes are not very militant — quite contrary, they are very colourful.

The shop sells Sergent Major childrenwear, so don’t expect any high profile names here. The clothes themselves seem to be of good quality and the price is not bad, either. The selection is also good, but not extensive.

Sergent Major, 10, Rue Saint Jacques, Grenoble, France, +33 4 7600 7121

I’m back home! In fact, I was here already yesterday, but I was so busy of doing nothing that I couldn’t share this fact with both of you. The trip back to Finland was eventless and thus nice, so I’ll just write a couple of observations instead of a full travelogue.

First, I got a lounge pass in Lyon airport and entered one of the smallest lounges that I’ve ever seen. There were three miniscule rooms, each seating eight or so people, so in total the lounge could accommodate 25 people. The views were to the runways, so I could spend my time watching the planes landing and taking off.

Secondly, Lufthansa could do a much better job with Frankfurt airport lounges. The lounge in terminal B is, for some odd reason, behind the passport control. You can go through the gates even without having a gate there — something very un-German — but you have to come through a security control to return to the Schengen area.

After several hours of travelling, I enjoyed sauna and then crashed to the bed almost immediately.

The whole Kalliola family visited Stockmann’s crazy days on the following day and found nothing that would have been worth buying. Instead, we raided the food department for the weekend’s meals and left the place. I took a few pictures of Tapiola for my upcoming Espoo reviews while walking back to our car. The rest of the day was a bliss, as I finished a book, ate well and then we rented a movie and savoured some candies.

Citadines Apart’Hotel is, as the name implies, an apartment hotel near the center of Grenoble. The hotel is designed for people that needs to stay in the town for extended periods of time, and thus the rooms have a miniscule kitchen with a small stove, a microwave oven with built-in grill, a fridge and a dishwasher.

Unfortunately, the bed is not designed for long-term living. For some reason that I can’t even fathom, the room has a sofabed. At the end of your stay, your back will beg for mercy as the bed is too soft and doesn’t support your properly.

The room itself is bare, but has quite ok working facilities. The hotel has a free WLAN, but it’s accessible only from the first floor, so during evenings you may find a lot of people surfing in the lobby.

There are no amenities to speak of, and the room is cleaned once a week. There is a vacuum cleaner in the cupboard, so you can clean it by yourself. The towels are changed also weekly. There is a washing machine at the downstairs, and the hotel provides also cleaning service for clothes.

www.citadines.com, 9-11, rue de Strasbourg, Grenoble, France, +33 4 7615 0200

Le Privilege is very typical French bistro in the downtown Grenoble, on Place Grenette. The restaurant itself is quite small, but it extends onto the patio doubling the seats.

The service was not very polite; let’s call it effective. The food itself was quite common type served in these restaurants. My entrecote had surprisingly much bits that were not edible — I’m used to eat everything that is served in the restaurant, but I’ve found recently out that that’s not the case in French. Fortunately, the food is not expensive either.

Once again, prepare to speak French or wave hands to get your messages through.

Le Privilege, 13 Place Grenette, Grenoble, France, +33 4 7644 1074