Everything is very clean and there is even heat!
As we said, we had some markka from changing our krooni in Tallinn, and had paid for the room and card with Visa, but we needed money. Alas, the only places open to change money that we knew of would be in the fancy hotels with bad rates. We decided that getting money on our Visa card from an ATM was the only answer. (We had overpaid on our Visa before leaving to avoid accumulating large interest charges if we did this, but the 'Lonely Planet' guide thinks ATMs should be avoided overseas because of the hassle if they eat your card. However, with all the banks closed and no relief in sight tomorrow--Sunday--we had little choice.)
Technology is wonderful--you can walk up to a machine in Helsinki, put in a piece of plastic, and punch in a number, and it gives you money. (Of course, we had to remember to look up the PIN for this card, since we never use it this way at home. In southeast Asia we had not done this, but banks were open longer hours there and took passports instead of PINs.)
So we got FIM 500 from a machine and were solvent again. (Considering that we already had United States cash, United States dollars travelers cheques, and some stray Deutschmarks from a recent trip, it's odd to say we weren't solvent before.)
We walked up the Esplanade. (This is pretty much the same in both official languages. It is actually two streets, the North Esplanade and the South Esplanade, which are Pohjoisesplanadi/Norra esplanaden and Etalaesplanadi/Sodra esplanaden respectively.) We were looking for an inexpensive place to eat, but we were beginning to think there weren't any in Helsinki. It is easy to see this is not the Baltic republics any more. Restaurants are now even expensive by United States standards. It took us a while to find an inexpensive-seeming restaurant and dinner for two still came to FIM 142 (about US$27.50). We had dinner at OMTA, a place that seemed like a Greek restaurant based on a couple of words on the menu but didn't seem to be serving what we would call Greek food. We shared a dish of chicken shaslik and one of shrimp with spinach. Two Coca-Colas came to over US$5 all by themselves. That's more than six times what a restaurant in one of the Baltic republics would charge. We will probably switch to water, which seems to be an acceptable drink with dinner here.
We are basically living in a dormitory and it is noisy like a dormitory also. Well, it is a *youth* hostel. Youths tend to be boisterous.
May 22, 1994: Mark was up at 6:00 so he took a shower while Evelyn and most of the dorm slept. The showers have all the nice features you could ask for and one that is a slight pain. The water flow is controlled by what in electronics would be called a 'dead-man's switch.' We have seen the same device on sinks in movie theaters. You get water while you are pressing on a knob and for a generous second or so afterward. Then the water cuts off. You basically have one hand that you can use for all other purposes. It pretty much guarantees that you do not take a long or enjoyable shower.
Evelyn went for a sauna, since a morning sauna is included in the price of the room. She thinks sauna is something she could get used to, but doubts she will have much chance once we get home. Mark, on the other hand, had tried sauna once and found he did not care for it. He said it reminded him a lot of the steamer they used at McDonalds to make the fish sandwich buns soft and moist. He didn't want his buns treated that way then and he still doesn't. Evelyn was the only person in the women's sauna, though she thinks she heard voices coming from the men's.
There is a cafeteria at the Eurohostel. Mark got a plate with yoghurt, a hamburger bun, butter, jam, coffee, two little slices of cheese, and two paper-thin slices of sausage. The cost was FIM 25 (about US$5). Not worth that price, but you cannot do much about it. Mark figures a Finnish markka has about 10 cents buying power when it comes to food. He says he will figure that is the price of a meal (one-tenth of the Finnish markka cost) and chalk the rest up to travel expense.
Well, the last few days were rainy and ugly. Today for a change the sky was clear and the sun was bright. As we left the room there was a hint of gray. We went out the door and the sky was already gray. After a few steps we felt some rain. At the end of a couple of blocks hail started falling. One more block and it was falling hard so we ducked into a fancy hotel to let people stare at us, to look for brochures, and to feel like interlopers. No wonder fancy hotels hate to have Eurohostels open in the same neighborhood. However, we did figure out that there didn't seem to be much going on in the evenings we'll be around--almost everything is later in the week.
After ten minutes the sun was shining and we started out again. This time it stayed sunny for a while.
We walked around Helsinki, remembering parts from our last visit in 1986. There were pods from peapods on the ground. In the summer the Finnish eat raw peas. Then you see a lot of empty pods about, much like in the Baltic republics you see banana peels.
Another thing we remembered was the street lights. You hear a beep-beeping if you should not go and a constant buzz if you can walk. It's a safety precaution. Also, the cars all have their lights on whenever they are moving. One of the Scandinavian countries tried that for a weekend to remind people to drive safely and it proved so effective that it became law. Put a Scandinavian car in drive and the lights go on automatically.
Our first stop for the day was to have been the Parliament Building for a guided tour, but when we passed the tourist information office it was open. It keeps new hours from when the tour books were published-- they had claimed it was closed on Sundays. We picked up a copy of 'Helsinki This Week' and also got their last English copy of 'Helsinki on Foot' It is a brochure with six walking tours and detailed descriptions of the sights you pass. Great for the budget traveler. We had thought we would buy the 'Helsinki Card,' but looking at the admission prices for what we were interested in, and realizing with everything close together we wouldn't be using the trolleys a lot, we decided it probably wasn't worth it.
We continued on to the beautiful art nouveau train station where we bought our tickets for Turku/Abo. Last time we had been in Helsinki we had gone to the train station, but the bus must have come from around the back, because Evelyn says don't remember the main entrance at all-- and with its four giant figures standing guard, two on either side of the door, it's pretty memorable.
The trains were exactly at the times Hannu Pajunen (our host in Turku) had told us, but after the shifting of schedules in Estonia, we figured it didn't hurt to check. Tickets were FIM 82 (US$16) each. Afterwards Evelyn realized that we were actually getting off at Kupittaa, but since that's 196 kilometers instead of the 200 kilometers to Turku, the price probably would have been the same.
The exchange rate we're seeing--it turns out there are a few places open to change money-- is about FIM 5.2 per United Sates dollar, not the FIM 5.47 we had seen in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago. What we get on our Visa withdrawals is anyone's guess, but it will be at least as good as the posted rates here.
The ticket-seller said he knew some English and would try to make himself understood. He spoke it better than several people we work with. Getting by in English in Helsinki is not very hard. Most of the Finns you deal with feel insecure about their English and should not be. As Mark says, 'Finns seem to be a likable, pleasant people who are easy to deal with. And at least one Finnish-American and some Finnish-Finns (if that is a word--native Finns) have been very friendly to Evelyn and me after reading our writing on the Usenet. So far we have seen zero begging, zero tourist-pestering, zero public drunkenness. This probably has something to do with never having been in the Soviet Union the way the Baltic republics were. A Finn might disagree, but Finland seems in a lot of ways better run than the United States.'
And we were going to see the seat of government that was doing such a good job. Since the tours were supposed to be at noon and 13:00, we got there about ten minutes to noon. Other tour groups were already waiting. Noon came and went. Then we saw the tour groups going away. A woman from one of the tour groups (one with a bunch of teenagers) explained that there was no tour on holidays. May 22? Today is Whitsunday. If it weren't for the fact that we had heard of this before, we probably would have thought it was a holiday they invented just to play a trick on us. (In Malaysia everything was closed one day we were there because of elections. In Israel we were in Haifa on a Saturday--no town is deader than Haifa on a Saturday.) As it is, Whitsunday seems to be a holiday peculiar to Finland, Iceland, and Denmark, and is seven Sundays after Easter. No tours.
Across the street in an old railway yard was a flea market (maybe it was a special Whitsunday flea market?). Like trolleys, these markets give you a good feel for the real society. Here you see for sale lots of clothing, old puzzles and toys, comic books, and a fair number of books. Mark bought a British mystery novel for FIM 5 (under US$1), the same price as each of two mini-dictionaries for translating from Finnish and Swedish respectively to English. Evelyn bought an inexpensive (FIM 4) pair of gloves that don't quite match in color, but will keep her hands warm in the chilly weather that is May this far north. (When the woman selling them saw they didn't match she wasn't going to sell them to Evelyn, but she must have seen Evelyn's disappointment and instead reduced them from FIM 5 to FIM 4.) We each bought a sausage for lunch for FIM 8 each. It must have been cheap sausage. The flavor was good but the meat was too soft. It was like eating porridge.
The National Museum was designed by Gesellius, Lindgren, and Saarinen. It is one of the nicer museums we've seen, at least as a national museum. Over the first hall are four beautiful murals from the Finnish national epic, the KALEVALA. The KALEVALA was first collected in the 1830s by Elias Lonnrot. It's even been made into a movie, THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE (which Mark says is not very good but we may order from Sinister Cinema when we get back anyway). One mural involves plowing a field that has snakes, one shows the killing of a monster serpent, one shows the making of the Sampo, and one shows the stealing of the Sampo. Mark thinks a Sampo is a device like a horn of plenty. It produces whatever you want. Not surprisingly, it is too coveted for its possessor's good. If Mark remembers rightly, misusing it may be dangerous also.
(Postscript: Mark says, 'We did get the film on our return and watched it. It was better than I remembered it, but still not really good. It is stagey and poorly dubbed, though some of the scenes are visually very nice. It reminds me a lot of the paintings in the museum.)
The museum has archaeological finds, weapons, and historical furnishings, including a Russian throne with feet like the Russian twoheaded eagle and each arm like a gold eagle head. There are religious carvings and paintings. There are portraits and Finnish furniture, and also ethnographic exhibits.
Mark took a picture of a stuffed reindeer as part of his personal campaign against the misinformation barrage we get every Christmas season about what a reindeer looks like. Any representation we ever see of reindeer shows them as looking like North American wild deer. The color is wrong; the shape is wrong. They are portrayed as frail and dewy-eyed, which is not at all correct. The size is about right, but a reindeer really looks a lot like a midget moose. They have big wide snouts. As you might expect (because reindeer really do pull sleighs), there is nothing dainty about them. They are small homely powerhouses.
The museum also had a temporary exhibit on Chilean culture. |
