Postcards are expensive here--FIM 3 each, or about US$0.60. (They were even more on Suomenlinna--FIM 4.) But then, everything is more expensive here. And we don't mean more expensive than the Baltic republics, but more expensive than home. On this trip it balances out somewhat, which helps.
On leaving we took (more) pictures of the stone bear outside the museum. Since the walking tour we started would take us a long way around a lake without a lot of interest for long stretches, we decided to switch to a different one. (Also, it looked like rain and the new tour didn't commit us to as much walking.)
We found a machine to get more money from, getting FIM 1000 this time. At first we tried changing money in a machine that claimed to take bills of various currencies and dispense Finnish markka. But it didn't recognize any of the four bills in two different denominations that we tried. 'We have machines like that at home,' Mark said.
'You mean machines that don't give you Finnish markka for dollars?' Evelyn countered. 'Of course we do. Our toaster, for example.'
But as Mark pointed out, it's really just a change-making machine that recognizes a lot of different inputs.
We also picked this new walking tour which started at Cathedral Square because we wanted to go to a concert there anyway.
The Cathedral, or rather Senate Square on which it stands, is one of the few images Evelyn says she remembers from our last trip here. She thinks that is because we didn't really see much in Helsinki and this was one of the three or four stops the bus made. (The others were the Sibelius Monument, the Rock Church--Temppeliaukion kirkkoEMand maybe Market Square. Or we may have walked to Market Square on our own--I know we went to the bookstore on our own. Then again, markets are just the sort of thing that tours like to take you to.)
Anyway, we followed the tour around, along the waterfront, looking at historic buildings and so on. About 16:30 we found ourselves opposite the Kolme krunnua (Three Crowns), recommended in the 'Lonely Planet' guide. Even though he had very little English, the owner did his best to help us with the menu, which was hand-written and hard to read. The food was very good. The price was much better than the previous night and the portions were really generous. (We think we'll stick to 'Lonely Planet' recommendations from now on, or at least seriously consider them first.) Evelyn had roast lamb and Mark had pork with melted cheese. The bill came to FIM 115, still a touch expensive by United States standards, but close ... about US$22.25. The rule in Finland is not to tip unless service is really good but the owner worked so hard translating we left an extra FIM 5.
From there we went back to the Cathedral for the concert being given by the people in our youth hostel. The woman we'd met had said it was 17:00, but when we looked it up in 'Helsinki This Week' it said 18:00. We got to the Cathedral at 17:45 only to find it was mostly over. In spite of the listing it was at 17:00. We heard the last part, however, and it was very beautiful. It combined choral music and a drum, oddly enough. We both thought the drum added a lot, but Mark thought a deeper-sounding drum would have been better. This sounded too much like workmen on the roof to him. (It was supposed to be FIM 30, but since we arrived so close to the end, the ticket-seller just waved us in.)
Well, back we went to the hotel, doing the walking tours near our hotel (on the island of Katajanokka/Skatudden) at the same time. (It's an island only because they dug a canal across the base of the peninsula it used to be.) We are right near the Finnish Film Foundation, but there is not much that can be seen from the outside. Chinese restaurants seem a bit expensive where we were looking. It is about US$10 a dish. We dropped some things off at our hotel, then continued on. Most of what we were seeing was architecture, particularly odd faces and animals on buildings. We were very close to the eight icebreakers in the fleet. They are big. Not as big as the luxury ships we see, but they still look like massive mountains of metal. We were also very close to the Helsinki County Prison, which turned out to be right next door to our hotel.
Back in the hotel we listened to some Sibelius and some Grieg (well, at least it is Scandinavian, if not a country we visit this time), and wrote in our logs.
May 23, 1994: According to the shortwave, at 8 degrees Centigrade we are about the coldest place in Scandinavia. It looked sunny when we got up, but as we were eating breakfast it was clouding up again. Breakfast was at the market down on the harbor. We shared a liter of strawberries--thinking of Dale Skran, a close friend at home who is also a strawberry fan. Evelyn had coffee--slightly more expensive here than at the hotel, but overall the meal was cheaper, and better. Mark tried to get a picture of the little birds who come begging. And he got a little strawberry juice on his log accidentally. He thinks he got a little strawberry juice on the name 'Sibelius.' It will look a little pink (though not in the version you're reading).
There is an indoor section of the market and we bought some cheese (gouda). It was FIM 59 per kilogram, so it was very, very roughly US$5.90 per pound. Actually it is US$5.16 per pound, but you are in the ball park by just dividing by 10. Mark wonders why every coin we get seems so shiny and new.
Since the weather looked moderately acceptable--we're beginning to think it doesn't ever get what one might call 'good' here, at least in May--our destination is the fortress island of Suomenlinna (Sveaborg). (Also, some of the other things we want to do aren't open on Monday.) Mark relates, 'During the Crimean War the island Suomenlinna, under the Russians, held off the combined sea forces of France and England--for a little while, anyway. It kept two powerful military fleets out of the bay--momentarily. It stood up to two powerful, advanced, well-funded navies--for a bit. And while the battle could not be termed an actual victory, it did provide a proud moment in Finnish history.'
You take a tour boat (FIM 20 each for the round trip) from Market Square and it brings you to the fortified island. (It also gives you a nice twenty-minute ride through the harbor each way.) We sailed at 10:00 with a school group. We seem at times doomed to be harried by school groups who block passageways, take longer to get on and off the boat than anyone else, and so on. The island, dubbed 'the Gibraltar of the North,' is a natural bastion for defending the Helsinki harbor. It had fortifications built and guns put in place. Today you can run around the forts and go to the various museums, typically on a military theme.
Since when we arrived at the island the school group headed for the Ehrensvard Museum, our first visit was to the Vesikko, a Finnish Uboat --the one we'd seen from the ferry on first arriving. (It's a submarine, of course, but here they're called U-boats. They are Finnish, however, not German.) In the post-WWII Paris Peace Treaty (1947), Finland had to scrap all its submarines but this one, to which it added two side doors for easy entry and turned it into 'Das Mooseum.' As Mark describes it, 'It is 134 feet (41 meters) long. It had a crew of twenty very cramped men, men living in hot bunks (that is, bunks that are constantly in use in twelve-hour shifts). It is hot, you sweat a lot in bed, then when you get up someone else sleeps on your sweat and his own sweat from the last shift. You are in an iron water bubble. If you walk five feet, you change the balance of the submarine and you tip it until somebody can pump water to restore the balance. You are stircrazy from the tight quarters and outside is either nothing but water and sky or nothing but water. You go to Hell to be punished for your sins on earth. If you commit sins in Hell, they put you on a U-boat. Recommended reading, incidentally, is THE BOAT (DAS BOOT) by Lothar- Gunther Buchheim.
By the way, it's not called World War II here. It's the Winter War and the Continuation War. The first was in late 1939 and 1940 when Finland went to war with the Soviet Union over territorial demands made by the latter, and the Continuation War was after a one-year 'peace' when Finland got some aid from Germany to fight the Soviet Union, which it did from 1941 to 1944, but its position was more anti-Soviet than pro-German. When they fought alongside the Germans, they let the Germans use Finland as a base of operations, but never allowed themselves to be occupied. Himmler insisted that if Finland got German aid it must deport the small population of 2000 Jews. Foreign Minister Rolf Witting neither refused nor agreed. he basically pretended not to hear Himmler's demand. Himmler did not press the point. In 1944 Finland was again forced to sign an armistice with the Soviet Union and to agree to fight Germany, or at least the Germans in Finland.
After visiting the submarine, we walked around exploring the fort walls inside and out. The Ehrensvard Museum--sort of the main museum of the fortress--is not technically one of the military museums, but it does show what officers' quarters were like, exhibiting rooms and furniture. Eventually it gets to uniforms, weapons, and artwork depicting battles. Particularly depicted was the siege of the island during the Crimean War in 1815 (August 9-11, though the Russian prints label it as July, since Russia had not yet switched to the Gregorian calendar, and would not do so until after the 1917 Revolution--what they call the Octoberists we should presumably call the Novembrists). J. W. Carmichael did one of the more famous drawings of the battle, with lights in the sky that look like UFOs. It must have been famous, because there seemed to be a half dozen different versions of engravings of it.
We walked around the ramparts for a while. There were cannon placed at various points, but they were from all different eras--some from the 19th Century and some clearly 20th Century in origin (with cogs and wheels for changing the elevation and a wheeled track for rotating). We happened to be passing a cafe when it started to rain, so we stopped for a snack before continuing on to the Coastal Defense Museum, devoted specifically to guns and aiming devices from the coastal defenses (what a surprise!) from the earliest times to the present and included a camera with a telephoto lens with a focal length of 250 *centimeters* (Steve, eat your heart out!). The museum was inside a hill, but must have been heated, as it was warmer than outside rather than cooler as one normally expects from caves and cave-like enclosures.
We continued around back to the dock and then to the adjoining island for the War Museum, which has relics of the Winter War and the Continuation War, including armored vehicles, a plane, a truck, and a bunker you can walk through. Each of the military museums is small by itself, but together they seem to form a decent museum of some size, making the combination ticket worthwhile if you're interested in military history. (And if you're not, you probably don't come to the island anyway.)
We decided to skip the Doll and Toy Museum (as not being representative of a military fortress), and took the 15:00 boat back to Market Square. Every half-hour or so it would cloud over and rain a little, and a half hour later it would clear up and be sunny.
We then proceeded to the inevitable--a bookstore, in this case, Akateeminen Kirjakauppa (Akademiska Bokhandeln in Swedish). Akateeminen Kirjakauppa is the biggest bookstore in Finland; somewhere Evelyn had read a claim that it was the biggest in the world, but this clearly isn't true. Evelyn writes, 'It celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1993, has a cafe, carries 140,000 titles (1,000,000 volumes), and was designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. (There was an article about it in the 27 September 1993 issue of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.) Akateeminen Kirjakauppa is across the street from the large Stockmann department store on Keskuskatu/Centralgatan at the corner of Pohjoisesplanaadi. |
