Helsinki, Finland
Helsinki was the first town where we hadn't scheduled any tours. It's fairly compact, safe, and English-speaking, so we grabbed a map we'd printed off the internet and headed into town via the ship's shuttle. Our first stop was Senate Square, where we arrived at the Lutheran cathedral about ten minutes after services started, so we couldn't go in, but Greg was amused by the eye in the pyramid which appeared over some of the doors.
We walked up to Finlandia Hall and wandered some of the trails through the surrounding park until the National Museum opened. There was an English tour beginning a few minutes after we got there, so that gave us a reasonable survey of the exhibits, and afterward we poked around on our own for a bit. The museum had a great program for kids called "Spot the Odd One Out." About half the exhibit rooms included something anachronistic: a display of wooden bowls included a soda bottle; a collection of old currency had Monopoly money in it. A group of stupid Americans fetched a museum staffer to complain about the wristwatch in the case with the sundials, and he pointed out the [huge, fluorescent yellow] sign next to the case indicating there was an Odd One Out. They read aloud the explanation, that the wristwatch indeed doesn't belong in the case because it was developed in 1910, then stomped off harumphing, "it should be in the 1910 exhibit, then."
A temporary exhibit in the basement introduced us to Aland, an "autonomous, demilitarized, monolingually-Swedish administrative province of Finland." We spent the most time watching a video [in Finnish] about the fortress of Bomarsund, a massive Russian fortification built in the early 1800s to house 5000 soldiers, and now barely visible as scattered stones overgrown with grass and moss. Historians photographed every inch of the existing site, and took plans, contemporary sketches and paintings, and even written references to a computer guy, who rebuit the entire structure in CAD. In another case, I was amused to see that despite the fact that they speak Swedish and occasionally (the last time was in 1917) try to have themselves ceded to Sweden, Alanders vehemently support Finnish hockey and football teams.
On our way to find some lunch, we found the famous Rock Church, absolutely mobbed by tourists; it's at a T-shaped intersection, and all three streets were completely blocked by coach busses. Naturally we decided to get lunch first. We walked much further than you might expect before finding a restaurant at all, and even further before we found one we could afford, so as Greg's blood sugar dropped more and more, we staggered into a Middle Eastern takeaway and ordered falafel. You know how every country takes another country's cuisine and makes it evil somehow? Like us taking Chinese food and making chop suey, or the Japanese putting anything that stands still on a pizza? Falafel in Helsinki has tomato sauce on it.
Back at the Rock Church, we figured out that the reason for the glut of busses was the church is only open to tourists for a few 15-minute blocks scattered throughout the day; we'd missed one by eating, and the next wasn't for hours--late enough that we'd miss the last shuttle back to the ship. Ann and Tim reported that it was "really cool," corroborated by the internet.
If the church is closed on Sunday, it must be time to go to the mall. We wandered through a large one in town, stopping at a jewelry store and an educational game shop, buying nothing. Instead, we walked to another church, the Uspenski Cathedral. Keeping the church-touring theme of the day, we arrived fifteen minutes after it closed for the day. We did get some neat photos of a rainbow over the onion domes, though. And since the church was closed...we went to a little market on the harbor, where we bought a considerably cheaper version of a neat juniper cutting board we'd seen in one of the boutiques in town.
Greg suggested we return to the Lutheran cathedral to see if it was open for tourists, and indeed it was. A female American organist from a church in France was rehearsing German music for a concert later that day, so we quietly videotaped as she ran through some Bach with a tenor. From there, we were lucky to squeeze on the third-to-last shuttle back to the ship--the penultimate and ultimate shuttles must have had people riding on the outside--then quickly walked about half a mile back toward town to photograph a really interesting (to me) stash of old street signs in some kind of storage pen near the dock.
We walked up to Finlandia Hall and wandered some of the trails through the surrounding park until the National Museum opened. There was an English tour beginning a few minutes after we got there, so that gave us a reasonable survey of the exhibits, and afterward we poked around on our own for a bit. The museum had a great program for kids called "Spot the Odd One Out." About half the exhibit rooms included something anachronistic: a display of wooden bowls included a soda bottle; a collection of old currency had Monopoly money in it. A group of stupid Americans fetched a museum staffer to complain about the wristwatch in the case with the sundials, and he pointed out the [huge, fluorescent yellow] sign next to the case indicating there was an Odd One Out. They read aloud the explanation, that the wristwatch indeed doesn't belong in the case because it was developed in 1910, then stomped off harumphing, "it should be in the 1910 exhibit, then."
A temporary exhibit in the basement introduced us to Aland, an "autonomous, demilitarized, monolingually-Swedish administrative province of Finland." We spent the most time watching a video [in Finnish] about the fortress of Bomarsund, a massive Russian fortification built in the early 1800s to house 5000 soldiers, and now barely visible as scattered stones overgrown with grass and moss. Historians photographed every inch of the existing site, and took plans, contemporary sketches and paintings, and even written references to a computer guy, who rebuit the entire structure in CAD. In another case, I was amused to see that despite the fact that they speak Swedish and occasionally (the last time was in 1917) try to have themselves ceded to Sweden, Alanders vehemently support Finnish hockey and football teams.
On our way to find some lunch, we found the famous Rock Church, absolutely mobbed by tourists; it's at a T-shaped intersection, and all three streets were completely blocked by coach busses. Naturally we decided to get lunch first. We walked much further than you might expect before finding a restaurant at all, and even further before we found one we could afford, so as Greg's blood sugar dropped more and more, we staggered into a Middle Eastern takeaway and ordered falafel. You know how every country takes another country's cuisine and makes it evil somehow? Like us taking Chinese food and making chop suey, or the Japanese putting anything that stands still on a pizza? Falafel in Helsinki has tomato sauce on it.
Back at the Rock Church, we figured out that the reason for the glut of busses was the church is only open to tourists for a few 15-minute blocks scattered throughout the day; we'd missed one by eating, and the next wasn't for hours--late enough that we'd miss the last shuttle back to the ship. Ann and Tim reported that it was "really cool," corroborated by the internet.
If the church is closed on Sunday, it must be time to go to the mall. We wandered through a large one in town, stopping at a jewelry store and an educational game shop, buying nothing. Instead, we walked to another church, the Uspenski Cathedral. Keeping the church-touring theme of the day, we arrived fifteen minutes after it closed for the day. We did get some neat photos of a rainbow over the onion domes, though. And since the church was closed...we went to a little market on the harbor, where we bought a considerably cheaper version of a neat juniper cutting board we'd seen in one of the boutiques in town.
Greg suggested we return to the Lutheran cathedral to see if it was open for tourists, and indeed it was. A female American organist from a church in France was rehearsing German music for a concert later that day, so we quietly videotaped as she ran through some Bach with a tenor. From there, we were lucky to squeeze on the third-to-last shuttle back to the ship--the penultimate and ultimate shuttles must have had people riding on the outside--then quickly walked about half a mile back toward town to photograph a really interesting (to me) stash of old street signs in some kind of storage pen near the dock.
Labels: honeymoon
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