Day 8
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| Helsinki |
Good morning open waters. The ferry is about 3 hours away from Helsinki and all I can see is ships on the horizon. I can count at least 5 from cabin window right now. I get the impression there is a lot of shipping and ferrying people on the Baltic sea.
It is exciting coming into port and seeing Helsinki. We've definitely left Scandinavia behind. It's a subtle difference, but it's there. Buildings are a little more functional than attractive, but this does change when you get away from the ferry terminal. It's still has more of a working class feel sort of city.
Since we arrived around 10 am we have no hotel rooms, so we are heading straight into our city tour. As always on this trip, we were greeted with an overcast day. I'm starting to miss the sun and warmth of spring at home. Speaking of home, the ferry had a small NHL section, including hats from the Toronto Maple Leafs. It seemed an odd choice all in all but was a little touch of home.
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| Rock Church |
Our city tour seems to be covering quite a bit of the must do list in Helsinki. We first saw the rock church. It's a Lutheran Church as 80% of Finns are Lutheran. It's a church built right into the rock bed and the acoustics are amazing because of that. The tour even lucked out that there was a men's choir singing, and wow, were the books right about the acoustics. Most of the walls are still rocks, aside from the front entrance.
The second stop was the Sybellius monument. It was built to commemorate the composer of the same name. Only it wasn't finished until after he died. The big game with it is to figure out what the monument is supposed to be exactly.
Go ahead, take a few seconds and guess. It's a series of 600 metal rods together in this shape.
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| Sybellius monument |
Done guessing? Okay, it's supposed to represent a musical note range. I guess I can see that. It is a little random finding this in the middle of a park in Helsinki.
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| Lutheran cathedral interior |
Our last stop was at another Lutheran church that is close to an open air market. The cathedral was really imposing about the square as it was built on top of the hill above the harbour. The outside was bright white and hard to miss and the inside was quite plain compared to many other churches I've seen. Which is typical according to our guide.
A block away right on the harbour was the open air market. They had some booths selling souvenirs, some fruit and quite a few food booths selling fish soup. I decided to go for a dessert crepe because it looked delicious. Only to have the damn seagulls steal it out of my hands. After the one pulled it out of my hands a couple dozen swarmed and it was all gone in seconds. I ate my second one in a quiet corner away from the birds. Amusingly, while telling this story to some of the tour group on the bus people misheard me and seemed to think that I had been mugged. Oh, old people.
A little farther away from the harbour, along the esplanade, was the usual Saturday flea market. It's a tradition to bring a sheet and all your random stuff from home and lay it out along the sidewalk with everyone else and see if you can sell some of your stuff. It mostly seemed to be women's clothing and there was quite a large turnout. They were there first thing in the morning and didn't start shutting down until late afternoon.
After the open air market we headed back to the hotel. Only many rooms weren't quite ready, so I dumped my bags and left for some adventuring. I did do another boat cruise and am hoping that since now the sun has poked out that maybe it won't be so cold! I have noticed that the people of Finland smoke a lot compared to Scandinavia. It was a nice break away from the smokers while in Scandinavia.
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| Uppenski Cathedral |
The boat cruise was nice but I have to admit, the countries all look a little similar from the water. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but this is my 4th boat city sightseeing cruise. I do have one planned for Iceland, but it also includes going out to the puffin islands! You could see the zoo, as it's on it's own island. We toured both harbours, which are a little far by sea, but a tiny couple blocks by land. And saw the rug tables. Everyone loved pointing these out. They have a few random docks with tables but no chairs or benches. I guess in the summer the people of Helsinki traditionally come out on a nice day and dip their rugs in the water and clean them on the tables.
After my city tour I headed up to the Uppenski Cathedral. I want to say that it's a Russian Orthodox church. There is a lot of Russian influence here. And they do have the one lovely church. Sadly, the inside was closed for a wedding and I didn't get a chance to look around. Also, I had another ferry ride to catch!
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| Suomenlinna from the ferry boat |
Helsinki is home of the UNESCO island of Suomenlinna. It's basically a series of islands as you enter the harbour of Helsinki that was the home of the old sea fortress. It is free to visit, you only have to pay to get there. It was a lovely little spot. Some of it is still used and people do appear to live in some of the buildings. I was a little disappointed that for the most part all you could do was walk around and look at the outside of the buildings. I did find one spot with some fantastic views of the sea. Only up on top of the hills it was incredibly, incredibly windy. I didn't end up spending too much time here.
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| the King's entrance of Suomenlinna |
After all my excitement I was tired and a little hungry. And discovered in my search for food that Mexican is a popular cuisine here. It seems like Mexico is really far away from Finland. Really far. But I ran into a few restaurants and did enjoy dinner at one because it was so nice and close. I was going to go out and do a bit more wandering but then it started pouring and I figured that I would have some time in the morning for that.
And one last note about Helsinki and Finland. They call their country Suomi. I did find that they had an even amount of tourist junk that had both names which was quite unusual compared to all the other destinations that just stuck the English version of their name on everything. Also, whoever invented those white shoulder bags with just the name of a city or country written on it in comic sans in different colors must be a millionaire. I see those damn bags in every place I go. Maybe not in Iceland, but all throughout Europe and North America for sure. But I rarely see anyone actually use them for the most part. But if they have them everywhere someone must buy them. There would be no doubt where you went.
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| View of the Baltic sea, I was excited to see the sun |
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