A couple of the worst meals ever

Other than the hideous food on the plane and the screaming little misbehaiving spoiled childeren on the flight from Helsinki to Amsterdam we are getting pretty good at this part of the trip.  We were able to sleep for at least 3 or 4 hours  on the flight over.  The process of getting to Europe is always somewhat grueling, however American Airlines has help to make it even more unbearable with one of the worst meals ever.  On flight from Chicago to Helsinki, shortly after the plane had reached altitude the crew served dinner in hopes of feeding them so they would go to sleep.  American Airlines managed to create something incredible vial.  They called it chicken.  It's always scary when they describe your choices as "Chicken" or "Pasta", with no embellishment.  I think it was Chicken cooked in ketchup maybe with a little soy sauce, and it was worse than it sounds.  Accompanying the rubber chicken with ketchup was grey beans.  Cooked to the point where they had lost any remnants of green or taste.  There was also a lovely side of instant mash potatoes.  It's tough when the best thing you can say about the meal was the butter was not rancid.  Even that could not save the white paste that looked similar to mashed potatoes.
We landed in Helsinki and has an 8 hour lay over before our plane to Amsterdam, so we decided to go into downtown Helsinki for the morning. It's Saturday morning and we thought this would be a really good time to visit.  However this turned out to be a continuation of my luck that had plagued me all over France.  If I want to go someplace, they must be closed that day.  It turned out that this was National "we're closed day" today.  It was the holiday they have for the summer solstice which was actually 3 day's before but they new I was coming so they decided to send everyone out of the city for the day.  I mean everything was closed.  No shops, no restaurants, no nothing.  In the whole city we managed to find 2 places serving food.  One a nice expensive place (I didn't feel like spending 50 Euro's each for lunch), or "Chilli;s", with 2 LL's.  The 2 LL's should have been my first clue to run away but we were out of options.   We opted for Chillis.  Really a fast food place.  Menu all in Finnish, but deep fried looking things and chopped up meat I can usually find something to eat in a pinch.  I ordered the fish with rice.  Linda ordered the kebab.  The fish was not bad.  Some kind of deep fried fish.  Linda's dish however was something else.  It looked like a gyro. That was the end of the similarity.  It was some kind of meat??  Cooked in a tomato sauce.  About three bits into it Linda looks at mine and say's "want to trade".  I'm pretty omnivorous and said sure.  It was pretty disturbing but I managed to choke down most of it, mostly because I knew I wasn't going to get fed for a while.  After having seen all of the closed Helsinki downtown area we caught the bus back to the airport.
While killing more time waiting for our flight I went into one of the gift shops where this place specialized in Reindeer   OK, I've never eaten Rudolf before so let's see how he tastes.  I had to pass on the packages of Reindeer liver and big muscles and opted for the Reindeer jerky.  It was kind of like particle board, dry and somewhat tasteless but it left a lot of fiberous remnant in your mouth.  I think that puts an end to my thought of being a Reindeer importer.
On the flight from Helsinki I swear it was the same child that

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