August 20, 2011
I’m awake by 0830; my room overlooks the main line of the Valtion Rautatiet (state railways), now known simply as VR, and a steady stream of trains in both directions stop at the Tikkurila platform to my left as I look out the window at an evergreen forest interspersed with commercial enterprises.
I booked my room through Orbitz at a non-refundable rate of US$119 per night, which included a breakfast buffet featuring mounds of American/Danish style streaky bacon, cold cuts, fish dishes, fruits such as bananas, watermelon and kiwi, dry cereals, the densest black bread I’ve ever seen, and various beverages. I took a room outside central Helsinki because of my late arrival (the hotel has a 24 hour front desk) and because an airport bus was reputed to be able to drop me off in front of the hotel (which is what happened). This hotel was clean and comfortable, unmistakenly Scandinavian in style, with a bathroom that turns into one big shower stall (like at hotels I’ve stayed at in Denmark and Sweden).
I got a €12 all day ticket to ride the trains, buses, trams and ferry in metropolitan Helsinki. A commuter train marked “N Helsinki” making the eight local stops between Tikkurila and Helsinki stations pulled in. The VR right of way is very well maintained, and a video screen in our car indicated that our speed was as high as 118 km (about 67 mph), not bad for a commuter train. 20 minutes later I was walking through Eliel Saarinen’s masterpiece train station, which opened in 1919.
Upon alighting from the train, I saw the National Parliament (Eduskunta) building fairly close by, and, after stopping in the Tourist Information office for some maps, walked over there to take pictures (sadly the building was closed). Kudos to the young woman who helped me at tourist information—she had just got done speaking Russian to a man and woman, and then started speaking flawless English to me.
Based on the materials I looked at, I decided that the island complex in the Helsinki harbor known as Suomenlinna (Sveaborg) was most interesting to me, and after walking around the Parliament and nearby National Museum buildings, I hopped on a tram that I hoped would take me to the ferry slip. I missed the stop for the ferry slip (about two blocks away), rolled past the impressive domed Evangelical Lutheran cathedral in Senate Square, and got off when I saw the gold onion shaped domes of the Finnish Orthodox cathedral perched above the harbor. It was wedding day in Helsinki, as I must have come across at least 10 wedding parties at various points during my wandering through the Finnish capital. As a result, I got barely a glimpse of the inside of the Orthodox cathedral (which was beautiful), and I got the door shut in my face at the Lutheran edifice (a woman bluntly told me “no sightseeing”). So I walked through the open air market which was going on near the water’s edge (you could buy anything from local handicrafts to Arctic cloudberries to smoke reindeer). The ferry ride over to Suomenlinna took less than 15 minutes. Helsinki harbor takes some knowledge and skill to navigate because of the many “skerries” (small islands, many little more than slate-like rocks sticking out of the water) there.
Suomenlinna consists of four major islands, some of which have fortifications that date back to the 18th century when the King of Sweden and the Czar of Russia vied over control of Finland. One of the islands was the campus of the national Naval Academy, and at the very end of another island was an “open prison” (a penal institution without guard towers surrounded by little more than a picket fence and signage warning the public to stay out). There were a number of museums, including a Finnish submarine, the “Vesikko”. There was a large wooden drydock, and also a Finnish coast guard post. A Lutheran church in the middle of one of the islands had its steeple double as a lighthouse. There is a restaurant/brewpub located near the ferry dock, where I enjoyed a pint draft of a craft brewed Pils for the outrageous price of €7.50 ($10.80). Oh well, what are you going to do after you’ve just walked about three miles and need a beer break?
After returning to the mainland, I decided to ride on the Helsinki metro and then walk back to the center of town. What happened was that I managed to ride underneath the route of the Helsinki Marathon, which was being contested that day, and had thousands of participants, 4,345 of which managed to run the entire 26.2 miles (the winning man ran the race in 2:23:24 and the winning woman’s time was 2:38:05). So I got stuck for close to an hour, which I managed to kill by buying a 1.5 liter bottle of Vichy brand sparkling mineral water (slightly brackish but really refreshing) and watch the runners make their way around the streets south of downtown.
As it turned out, the big race ended on the running track within Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium, where the 1952 summer games were contested. I was finally able to cross a street, and three blocks further down I was able to catch a tram, which took me past the famous Rock Church, and then I was able to transfer to another tram, which dropped me off near the stadium. Passing the statues of the famous Finnish running stars Paavo Nurmi and Lasse Viren, I was able to join a crowd of maybe 5,000 within the stadium (reported capacity 40,000) and watch those brave and hardy souls who had no chance to win the race but ran for the joy of running and completing an incredibly difficult feat; I saw the 1000th placed runner finish in slightly less than 4 hours (a lot better man than me).
Having been on my own “marathon” (I probably walked somewhere between 6-7 miles), and with my hips and calves begging me to stop, I got back to the main railway station about 2000, caught a train, and was asleep by 2100.
My impressions of Helsinki was that it was, in the main, a pleasant but not terribly interesting city, with excellent public transportation, and incredibly high prices. Gasoline was selling for $8.70 per gallon; a double deck hamburger combo (w/ fries and a Coke) went for $14.00 at a “Hesburger”, the largest hamburger chain in the country (bigger than Micky D’s there). A bottle deposit on a 1.5 liter bottle of soda runs €0.40 (almost 60 US cents). I laughed at the name “Hesburger”, wondering whether Father Theodore Hesburgh, longtime president of Notre Dame, had come out of retirement at age 94 to flip burgers in eastern Europe.
Given the remarkably high prices in Finland, my hotel room, with breakfast included, was a relative bargain.
I was fascinated by the Finnish language, which is basically impenetrable to an English speaker, and has relatively few words which are intuitive to Indo-European languages in the region such as Swedish or Russian (Estonian is close to Finnish). One thing a visitor to the country notices is that pretty much all signage is in both Finnish and Swedish (perhaps owing to the allegiance of Swedish nobility with common Finnish people who threw off Russian rule at the end of the First World War). The language does not use the letters b, c, d, q, x or z, and has eight different vowels (a, ä, e, I, o, ö, u and y) which are long vowels when they are doubled. There are no articles or prepositions, with suffixes attached to words, such as an “n” or “in” indicating possession, or a “t” or “at” indicating plural. It was only a spoken language until about 200 years ago. By the end of my day, I was able to count to two (yksi and kaksi) and to say thank you (“kiitos”).
Pictures of my day in Helsinki are found here:
http://pangborn76.smugmug.com/Other/...723154_hTrHhzj