Week 31: Finland
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For someone who doesn’t usually do country hopping I’ve certainly been racking them up in the last little bit, and it won’t stop for another couple of weeks. I’m still in Finland but now in Turku, from where I will take the boat to Stockholm. Country number 5 in as many weeks and unfortunately currency number 5 as well. I did have to choose European countries that haven’t adopted the Euro didn’t I? Apart from Finland of course.
Last I wrote I was in Estonia, hanging out in Tallinn. I spent a few hours at the Tallinn City Theatre with a couchsurfer and got a great tour of the backstage areas and building. The building is actually 3 different adjacent houses that have been renovated to make one impressive complex. There are 5 stages in different parts of the building and we walked up stairs, along corridors, down stairs, around corners, up stairs, past pool tables and into dressing rooms and basements as we visited them all. It was amazing; I could spend my life exploring all the nooks and crannies. I’d order delivery pizza to a different corner every day and play hide and seek with the delivery man. One of the stages is in the basement and apparently quite difficult to work with, though it looks fantastic. A few weeks ago when it rained the water came in through the power points, which can never be a good thing. Unfortunately I didn’t see a play as those showing while I was there were in Estonian and a little esoteric. As the woman showing me around explained, they can be difficult to understand for a native Estonian speaker.
The ferry ride to Helsinki was short (and had wifi!) and once on land I met up with a guy who was a passenger on one of the tours I led in Japan. We’ve stayed in touch and caught up in Sydney when he was in town late last year (and by random coincidence I was home). He took me to a smoke sauna which is a particularly Finnish style of sauna. The wood is burned in a large stove and the smoke is kept inside due to a lack of chimney. When the sauna is hot enough the smoke is let out and the sauna is ready to be used. My first image of the sauna was two steaming people standing outside the door in the semi-darkness of a northern winter evening. We stripped down to swimmers and headed in, Anders explaining the protocol to this bumbling tourist. We poured a few ladles of water over our head, sat on wooden boards to protect our behinds from being blackened with the residual soot and sat down to sweat. And sweat we did, huge drips of it. There was a lake outside and after a bit of working up to it I went for a quick swim. The water was 3 degrees, and as Anders cheerfully pointed out it doesn’t get much colder than that, even in the depths of winter, before it turns to ice.
I went back a few days later and we hit it when it was fresher and hotter. Wow! Talk about sweating! Anders also explained how you should pour water on the hot stones, all in one place instead of splashing it all over the place. That way the heat spike is more gradual and smoother. Either way, my skin burned and my fingernails heated up in a most disconcerting way.
My days in Helsinki were accompanied by cloudy skies and rain. Not the optimal time to be in this part of the world but it’s easy to see that it would be beautiful in better weather. There are lots of lakes, water and parks around and people here are out making use of them. Even in the soggy autumn weather there were heaps of people out running, cycling or walking the many purpose built paths amongst the autumn leaves. I wandered around the Finlandia building, the market square and the western shore of the Helsinki peninsula. The Temppeliaukio Church, opened in 1969 was an impressive building partially carved out of the bedrock. A mish mash of textures and materials, it used concrete, wood, glass, copper and unworked natural rock to create a building quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
On one of my full days I headed out to Suomenlinna, the impressive fortress complex located on islands close to the city. It’s been an important defensive position since it was built in 1748 by the Swedish, who controlled Finland at the time. It was designed to help halt the expansion of the Russian empire but in 1808 it surrendered to the Russian forces and Finland was an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian empire until the 1917 revolution. These days it’s a popular picnic spot (in summer), one of Helsinki’s most popular tourist attractions and UNESCO world heritage site. I spent a few hours wandering around, exploring the many tunnels and storage rooms hidden under innocent looking hillocks along the shoreline. It really was an impressive complex and used up an incredible amount of Swedish and French resources (the French were allied with Sweden against Russia at the time). When completed it housed officers and their families in a settlement that rivalled Helsinki in size at the time. These days there are still around 800 people living on the islands.
On another day in Helsinki I headed to Porvoo, Finland’s second oldest town after Turku (where I am now). The medieval old town is a quaint collection of wooden buildings and I wandered around for a while until the rain started annoying me. Unfortunately the photos I’ve taken this week aren’t all that fantastic, the weather has really been a downer. It hasn’t even been moodily photogenic, just bleak and grey. Of course this is the photographer in me talking, for wandering around it hasn’t been all that bad.
On Friday I catch the ferry to Stockholm for a few days and then on November 4th I meet Brett again in Bergen, southern Norway. We’re not sure where we’re going next, our plans keep changing. Maybe Bulgaria?
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