FINLAND, a country where it is OK to have a double A in your name!!

After our 'restful' night at Oslo airport we arrived at Helsinki at about 10 am, picked up our bags & headed for the local buses out the front. Gee, Mr Google is a godsend, he knows everything, just asked him how to get from the airport to the central railway station & voila!! Cheap as chips, scenic run through the suburbs, bus full of locals, dropped us at the door of the main Helsinki railway station, we left our luggage in the storage lockers for the day and headed to the tourist information office. 

Helsinki Central Railway Station

Our couchsurfing host, the gorgeous Marko, was coming into the city that evening for a meeting & offered to pick us up, how lovely of him, so we were free to wander & get our bearings on the first day.

Now finding the tourist information office proved harder than we expected, I had scribbled a mud-map from the net & Grant, the eternal optimist, wanted to use his GPS. Well neither worked & we had to use the old stand-by, ask a local!! His instructions were perfect & after 10 minutes of strolling we were there.  Map, numerous pamphlets & brochures in hand, we opted for the 3B/3T tram, Mr Google told me about it too. Five Euro for two to do a hop-on hop-off figure eight trip round the city with many of the city highlights marked on the map with a brief desciption. It wasn't a guided tour just a regular city tram but with the brochures & keeping our eyes open we managed.

One of the older style city trams, they had more modern ones too

Of course it might have been better if we had jumped on, on the correct side of the road (typical of me to get that wrong, I am having trouble with traffic on the other side of the road, Grant has to grab my arm at almost every road crossing as I always look the wrong way). Anyway we ended up doing the trip backwards, started at stop number 30 then worked backwards to one, not a problem really except that everything was on the opposite side of the road to the brochure & you had to keep looking backwards out the windows. Not to panic, we did the trip again before we left Helsinki, in the correct direction & that was a much better.

After the tram trip we went walking, to the Helsinki Cathedral, not unlike the Sacre Coeur really, huge, pure white, on the top of the only hill, staircase out the front and ice-cream vendors.  Quite beautiful with a good view of the surrounding area although Helsinki is flat and the hill wasn't high enough to give an overview of the city it was still lovely.

Helsinki Cathedral

We visited the market square which is near the Tourist info & the jetty. It is a regular market, every day really and we bought some dinner, (whitebait, calamari & chips, whitebait for me, rest for Grant) and wandered the stalls. Grant just loves the big furry hats with the earflaps, shame it isn't 20 below or he would have bought one. Especially loves the reindeer leather ones with fox lining. I saw some small sketches that I was keen on but managed to restrain myself. We also went to the jetty and got brochures for the harbour cruises, as I wanted to read up a bit to decide on a trip for the next day.

Orange-roofed market stalls filled the dock area,
not permanent structures but rather packed up every day

Next day we caught a train from the local station into the city & walked to the Fire Station for Grant to collect another badge. As always he was welcomed and given a tour of the facilities, they had a sauna, can you believe it? Next, to the jetty for our harbour cruise at 11.30am. Fine, sunny & quite hot really, we saw lots of people sunning themselves on the islands dotting the harbour, even saw one fellow in the water swimming!! Unbelievable, I wouldn't have put my foot in to test the temperature. The cruise commentary was really good and we learnt a lot about Finnish history, they have had a pretty turbulent time.

Old City Markets, viewed from the departing ferry cruise

There are two official languages here, Finnish of course & Swedish so all the signs are in two languages including the street signs which is a bit confusing to say the least. The rest of the afternoon & evening we walked round the city centre, looking at & photographing the major historical sites. There is a lovely explanade garden area with a bandstand & there were musical performances so that was a nice treat to listen to as we ate our icecreams (believe it or not they had licorice flavoured, had to have one, it was delicious).

The icecream kiosk, has been operating as a shop for 150 years

We also found a few minutes to walk to the Russian Orthodox church near the port, OMG, the decorations were amazing, so ornate & the nice young man let me take a couple of quick photos as we were the only tourist at the time.

Next day, was a ferry trip to Suomenlinna (a sea fortress in the middle of the harbour) then a bit more time in town to catch the last of the things we had missed including the fabulous church blasted into solid rock. At the fortess we walked, picnicked & fought our way along the cannon battlement wall in a howling gale. It was a lovely spot, a bit like Rottnest Island really in that every man & his dog goes there on fine sunny days - swimming, sunning themselves on the rocks, playing a scratch game of soccer with mates, kids climbing all over the cannons, parents pushing prams etc, there was a really lovely family atmosphere.

Might breezy out at the cannon embattlements

'The King's Gate' original main entrance to fortress - amazing stonework

Up with the sparrows, nothing unusual there really, showered, shampooed & packed up, said our goodbyes, hoofed it to the railway station, waited for the express train (love these 140 kph journeys - so quiet, so quick) & headed for the city again. This time we dropped all but a couple of essentials into storage at the railway station as we couldn't see any real reason to bring everything we owned for just the one night & then have to lug it round Tallinn all day. We can rough it for one night surely! So with a daypack each we found the bus, route 15A, and rode the 3+ kms to the Dock.