Thanks to a favorable time difference and no need to get anywhere fast in the morning I was able to get a very restful night’s sleep in the hostel and have a nice (and very big and not Russian!) breakfast. My favorite part of breakfast was that all the dishes and flatware where from IKEA, how Scandinavian of them!
Full of food and in good spirits to be in Finland and because it was not raining we set off for the docks and our ferry to Suomenlinna Island and Sea Fortress. The group leaving kept getting better, and after we by chance met another group of people from our program over 20 ended up on the same ferry and we would continue to run into them all over the place.
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| Oh NO! Vikings!!!! |
And now a little history lesson: Suomenlinna Sea Fortress was originally built by the Swedes to protect the city of Helsinki and to act as a base in their wars against Russia in 1748. By 1808 Finland became part of Russia and the Russians garrison the island until Finnish independence in 1917. It suffered serious damage from a combined French and British fleet during the Crimean war and this is what the current state of the fortress most accurately reflects.
We walked all over the rather small island walking on, in and even under the battlements. While it is not exactly a full sized medieval castle (still a life goal) nor is it in the pristine condition of Peter and Paul fortress in St Petersburg it was a great way to spend a few hours. I got many good pictures of the fortifications and of my friends having fun all over the island and UNESCO world heritage site, here are just a few:
After we left on the ferry off the island, and ready for lunch we headed to the huge downtown Mall called Forum, and their food court. While this might seem like a silly thing to do, considering how much Russian food we have been eating it was amazing. I had Chinese food for the first time in several months, and it was very good! After that we checked out many of the cool and relatively expensive stores around Meterhiem Street in downtown Helsinki including the world famous Finnish department store Stockmann. In all of our time at stores amoung the hip young European clientele I bought a new pair of knit gloves since my $1.20 Russian ones where just not doing it anymore, so I wonder how $2.80 Finnish ones will do (but don’t worry I have a much nicer pair of American gloves for when it is really cold). The balance of the day was spent walking around, taking pictures, eating lots of great food and generally enjoying life in this happy city. The downtown really is a small area, easily traversed by foot while still somehow keeping a big city feel.
I now understand and can plainly see why Finland is so consistently at the top of international quality of life surveys. The only real problem is the very short days, sunrise around 9 and totally dark out by 4, and cold/ rainy weather this place would be a paradise. Interestingly I was not very cold today, most of the chill in the air comes from the cold winds from the Baltic, but they did not bother me at all, even out on the water.
But I did get a rather nasty windburn, basically feels like sunburn caused by the cold and constant winds, but it goes away within hours instead of days. At first I thought it was sunburn because it felt like one, of course I am the only person on Earth who could get sun burnt in Northern Europe in November on a cloudy day with 7 hours of sunlight. Tomorrow we have another early morning, we will take a 2 hour ferry trip across the Gulf of Finland (or the Finnish puddle as some Russians call it) to Tallinn Estonia.
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| Matt of the Even FURTHER North |
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