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I've been living for tomorrows all my life
Recently we embarked on a whirlwind tour of Scandinavian capital cities. We booked pretty much at the last minute, with Discover The World, whom we've used before. If you want an agent to book you a holiday somewhere chilly, I'd highly recommend them.
About three days before we left, we realised that we had very little idea what in particular we wanted to do in any of these cities, and didn't really have time to start looking it up. Fortunately, a fat parcel showed up on our doorstep from Discover The World, containing a glossy guidebook, plus a whole bunch of leaflets and maps for each city. Ideal on-the-plane reading! And so we set off...
Friday 4th
We flew into Helsinki in the afternoon, and discovered that Finnish bus stations are like bus stations everywhere: a maze of twisty, turny bus stops, all alike, and with little clue on how to locate the stop for the bus you want. Fortunately, there was a human in a natty purple jacket capable of advising people in about eight different languages. No, you don't want the bus anyway. Take the shuttle, and then the train.
So we did that, and cruised smoothly into Helsinki's main railway station, which is built in a rather stunning style that I'm going to call Soviet Art Deco. Opposite was our hotel, which was clearly a leftover from the Grand Old Days of train travel with an amazing sweeping staircase, glamorous bar, and stunning dining room. It was also, if you looked closely, showing signs of wear - and we got rather well acquainted with the sweeping staircase as we swept up all five (high-ceilinged) storeys to our room each time the lift was out of order.
Our approach to new cities is usually to go out and walk around them, so we sallied forth into the evening sunshine and strolled down to the harbour and admired the twiddly gold bobbles of the orthodox cathedral, then circumnavigated a small island. Halfway round the island we spied a Thing: was it a climbing frame? Was it art?
On close inspection it proved to be a ... Thing. With a large blanket draped over it. And that is... a mangle? Wait, no, it actually is a mangle! A communal mangle, presumably for the use of those flats! And those wooden things are drying racks, currently drying a blanket. What a great idea.
Shortly afterwards, ChrisC finished his bottle of pop, flattened the bottle, and stood peering at a bin trying to work out whether it was rubbish or recycling. A fortuitous gentleman passing on a bike held out his hand, took the bottle, and added it to a plastic bag full of bottles. Err...
Ah! That odd charge on the till receipt when we bought the pop, that's a deposit, that is. It became a bit of a feature of the holiday that we saw people collecting abandoned bottles, and sorting through bins for items with a deposit. I guess one way to handle your country's recycling is to make it sufficiently profitable that some people will choose to take it on.
Helsinki - which apparently has a bit of a chip on its shoulder since Berlusconi slammed Finnish food a decade ago - is teeming with nice restaurants. However, almost all of them were Italian, or French, or Asian. After a bit of a petulant interaction with Google (thank you, 3 mobile, for giving me free data in all the countries we were visiting) I steered us to Ravintola Lasipalatsi (some time later, I figured out that "ravintola" is Finnish for restaurant. Really, Finnish is like nothing on earth.)
We ate well - I ordered lamb vorschmack with little idea what it was. Although they kindly produced English menus and spoke excellent English at us, "vorschmack" remained untranslated. I ate it - along with a baked potato, pickled gerkins, beetroot, and buckets of sour cream - and enjoyed it immensely, without ever really working out what it was. Wikipedia tells me it's basically ground meat, ground anchovies, and onions. Sod Berlusconi, I thought it was great. And I had Finnish beer, and finished with some Finnish blue cheese and a small glass of port (nationality unknown).
Saturday 5th
While I was reading guidebooks frantically before departure, ChrisC was doing his own form of research: looking at Google maps to see if he could spot islands, interestingly-shaped bodies of water, or anything generally funny-looking when viewed from the air. This is, actually, a surprisingly reliable way of finding things worth visiting, and in this case sent us off to the Finnish sea-fortress of Suomenlinna.
So after a somewhat excessive hotel breakfast (involving spelt and barley porridge and two kinds of pickled herring) (more conventional options were available) we trundled off to get a boat. This is around the time that we confirmed that all our usual sources of weather-forecast (in particular, the BBC) appear to give rubbish forecasts for Finland. We got very rained on, and I discovered that my waterproof is badly named. Eventually we shuffled onto the boat, in my case very damp, and ten minutes or so later disembarked on Suomenlinna.
In our usual perverse way, we walked away from the visitor centre and off into the residential bits and the section which is still an active naval base, before heading back to join a proper tour. Along with just about everyone else we encountered for the rest of the trip, our tourguide spoke excellent English - well enough to make jokes - and for a couple of hours walked us round various bits of the main fort. I became very aware that the history I learned in school is very Anglo-Centric - Suomenlinna was heavily bombed by the English in the 19th century? Err... what, why were we bombing Finland? (Answer: Finland was then a part of Russia, and it was Crimea-related shennanigans).
The tour was punctuated by bands of people in military fatigues marching or ambling past carrying guns. I was relieved to notice they were quite fake-looking guns, though we never really worked out whether the people were cadets, naval, or what. We cheerfully passed another few hours trundling around the island (we saw a hare!) and clambering through tunnels. The café supplied an afternoon nibble (in my case, in the form of a confusingly cinnamon-flavoured feta pasty) and we sallied round the museum. We located an excellent photography exhibition about work in the fortress' dry dock - now used for restoration and maintenance of traditional Finnish wooden ships - and eventually threw ourselves out before we got locked in.
The rain had cleared itself up into a beautiful golden afternoon, so we elected to miss the boat and wander for another hour before heading back to the mainland. Once back, we took ourselves off to a studenty area of Helskini to visit a recommended "budget" bar/restaurant next to a music venue - we dined to the faint sounds of some sort of clichéd black metal from next door. It was very nice, though it wasn't my idea of "budget". This was a recurring theme of the holiday - eating out in Scandinavia is just expensive.
Back at the hotel, we popped into their very 20s bar. I ordered a rose cobbler, which sounded nice and in-keeping with the decade to me. Shows how much I know - the cocktail menu further elaborated that it was invented in the 1860s to allow a hostess to show off that she was keeping up with two of the very latest trends: ice and straws!
A screen in the bar showed nice photos of France - as far as I can tell, anything in Finland that wants to be sophisticated aims for France - and occasional quotations from, say, Wilde and Monroe on champagne, translated into Finnish.
Sunday 6th
At breakfast, I was of course delighted to see that they'd upped it to three kinds of pickled herring. Admittedly the extra one appeared, tastewise, to have been marinated in strawberry jam, which was a bit odd.
Sunday was beautiful weather, so after packing up and depositing our luggage at the ferry terminal we pottered gently around the city, taking in some parks, a hilltop observatory, lots of waterfront, and a street famous for its "Jugenstil" (i.e. Art Noveau) buildings. We also passed through the design district, but almost everything was closed, so we were confined to window-shopping.
Despite the giant breakfast, we weren't really sure what the eating arrangements were on the boat we were getting on, so thought we'd better have a little lunch to be sure. We grabbed a sandwich and a... yes, not sure, one of them, in a supermarket and ate them in Tove Jansson Park (which, disappointingly, is about the only place in Helsinki where you can't see Moomins). Wikipedia tells me the mysterious thing was a rice tart with a rye crust and it was... fine. Wikipedia also says you're supposed to eat it spread with egg, which we didn't have to hand. Nowt special. But it kept us going as we headed back up to the ferry terminal.
Much less wordy and more pictorial version of the above available on Flickr.
About three days before we left, we realised that we had very little idea what in particular we wanted to do in any of these cities, and didn't really have time to start looking it up. Fortunately, a fat parcel showed up on our doorstep from Discover The World, containing a glossy guidebook, plus a whole bunch of leaflets and maps for each city. Ideal on-the-plane reading! And so we set off...
Friday 4th
We flew into Helsinki in the afternoon, and discovered that Finnish bus stations are like bus stations everywhere: a maze of twisty, turny bus stops, all alike, and with little clue on how to locate the stop for the bus you want. Fortunately, there was a human in a natty purple jacket capable of advising people in about eight different languages. No, you don't want the bus anyway. Take the shuttle, and then the train.
So we did that, and cruised smoothly into Helsinki's main railway station, which is built in a rather stunning style that I'm going to call Soviet Art Deco. Opposite was our hotel, which was clearly a leftover from the Grand Old Days of train travel with an amazing sweeping staircase, glamorous bar, and stunning dining room. It was also, if you looked closely, showing signs of wear - and we got rather well acquainted with the sweeping staircase as we swept up all five (high-ceilinged) storeys to our room each time the lift was out of order.
Our approach to new cities is usually to go out and walk around them, so we sallied forth into the evening sunshine and strolled down to the harbour and admired the twiddly gold bobbles of the orthodox cathedral, then circumnavigated a small island. Halfway round the island we spied a Thing: was it a climbing frame? Was it art?
On close inspection it proved to be a ... Thing. With a large blanket draped over it. And that is... a mangle? Wait, no, it actually is a mangle! A communal mangle, presumably for the use of those flats! And those wooden things are drying racks, currently drying a blanket. What a great idea.
Shortly afterwards, ChrisC finished his bottle of pop, flattened the bottle, and stood peering at a bin trying to work out whether it was rubbish or recycling. A fortuitous gentleman passing on a bike held out his hand, took the bottle, and added it to a plastic bag full of bottles. Err...
Ah! That odd charge on the till receipt when we bought the pop, that's a deposit, that is. It became a bit of a feature of the holiday that we saw people collecting abandoned bottles, and sorting through bins for items with a deposit. I guess one way to handle your country's recycling is to make it sufficiently profitable that some people will choose to take it on.
Helsinki - which apparently has a bit of a chip on its shoulder since Berlusconi slammed Finnish food a decade ago - is teeming with nice restaurants. However, almost all of them were Italian, or French, or Asian. After a bit of a petulant interaction with Google (thank you, 3 mobile, for giving me free data in all the countries we were visiting) I steered us to Ravintola Lasipalatsi (some time later, I figured out that "ravintola" is Finnish for restaurant. Really, Finnish is like nothing on earth.)
We ate well - I ordered lamb vorschmack with little idea what it was. Although they kindly produced English menus and spoke excellent English at us, "vorschmack" remained untranslated. I ate it - along with a baked potato, pickled gerkins, beetroot, and buckets of sour cream - and enjoyed it immensely, without ever really working out what it was. Wikipedia tells me it's basically ground meat, ground anchovies, and onions. Sod Berlusconi, I thought it was great. And I had Finnish beer, and finished with some Finnish blue cheese and a small glass of port (nationality unknown).
Saturday 5th
While I was reading guidebooks frantically before departure, ChrisC was doing his own form of research: looking at Google maps to see if he could spot islands, interestingly-shaped bodies of water, or anything generally funny-looking when viewed from the air. This is, actually, a surprisingly reliable way of finding things worth visiting, and in this case sent us off to the Finnish sea-fortress of Suomenlinna.
So after a somewhat excessive hotel breakfast (involving spelt and barley porridge and two kinds of pickled herring) (more conventional options were available) we trundled off to get a boat. This is around the time that we confirmed that all our usual sources of weather-forecast (in particular, the BBC) appear to give rubbish forecasts for Finland. We got very rained on, and I discovered that my waterproof is badly named. Eventually we shuffled onto the boat, in my case very damp, and ten minutes or so later disembarked on Suomenlinna.
In our usual perverse way, we walked away from the visitor centre and off into the residential bits and the section which is still an active naval base, before heading back to join a proper tour. Along with just about everyone else we encountered for the rest of the trip, our tourguide spoke excellent English - well enough to make jokes - and for a couple of hours walked us round various bits of the main fort. I became very aware that the history I learned in school is very Anglo-Centric - Suomenlinna was heavily bombed by the English in the 19th century? Err... what, why were we bombing Finland? (Answer: Finland was then a part of Russia, and it was Crimea-related shennanigans).
The tour was punctuated by bands of people in military fatigues marching or ambling past carrying guns. I was relieved to notice they were quite fake-looking guns, though we never really worked out whether the people were cadets, naval, or what. We cheerfully passed another few hours trundling around the island (we saw a hare!) and clambering through tunnels. The café supplied an afternoon nibble (in my case, in the form of a confusingly cinnamon-flavoured feta pasty) and we sallied round the museum. We located an excellent photography exhibition about work in the fortress' dry dock - now used for restoration and maintenance of traditional Finnish wooden ships - and eventually threw ourselves out before we got locked in.
The rain had cleared itself up into a beautiful golden afternoon, so we elected to miss the boat and wander for another hour before heading back to the mainland. Once back, we took ourselves off to a studenty area of Helskini to visit a recommended "budget" bar/restaurant next to a music venue - we dined to the faint sounds of some sort of clichéd black metal from next door. It was very nice, though it wasn't my idea of "budget". This was a recurring theme of the holiday - eating out in Scandinavia is just expensive.
Back at the hotel, we popped into their very 20s bar. I ordered a rose cobbler, which sounded nice and in-keeping with the decade to me. Shows how much I know - the cocktail menu further elaborated that it was invented in the 1860s to allow a hostess to show off that she was keeping up with two of the very latest trends: ice and straws!
A screen in the bar showed nice photos of France - as far as I can tell, anything in Finland that wants to be sophisticated aims for France - and occasional quotations from, say, Wilde and Monroe on champagne, translated into Finnish.
Sunday 6th
At breakfast, I was of course delighted to see that they'd upped it to three kinds of pickled herring. Admittedly the extra one appeared, tastewise, to have been marinated in strawberry jam, which was a bit odd.
Sunday was beautiful weather, so after packing up and depositing our luggage at the ferry terminal we pottered gently around the city, taking in some parks, a hilltop observatory, lots of waterfront, and a street famous for its "Jugenstil" (i.e. Art Noveau) buildings. We also passed through the design district, but almost everything was closed, so we were confined to window-shopping.
Despite the giant breakfast, we weren't really sure what the eating arrangements were on the boat we were getting on, so thought we'd better have a little lunch to be sure. We grabbed a sandwich and a... yes, not sure, one of them, in a supermarket and ate them in Tove Jansson Park (which, disappointingly, is about the only place in Helsinki where you can't see Moomins). Wikipedia tells me the mysterious thing was a rice tart with a rye crust and it was... fine. Wikipedia also says you're supposed to eat it spread with egg, which we didn't have to hand. Nowt special. But it kept us going as we headed back up to the ferry terminal.
Much less wordy and more pictorial version of the above available on Flickr.