Arctic Circle Tour - Helsinki, Finland

Finnish
YES/NO Kylla/Ei
HELLO/GOODBYE Hei/Nakamiin
PLEASE/THANKYOU Ole hyva/Kiitos
CHEERS Kippis
CURRENCY Euro

After a great Finnish breakfast of smoked, pickled, dried, salted, fermented, dried, baked and raw salmon and herrings and some salad we set out to explore Helsinki.

We were sort of expecting Helsinki to be like John Le Carre’s cold war books where spies were exchanging secrets with the Russians but instead found a modern city with great transport infrastructure, bike paths EVERYWHERE, glass fronted high rises, beautiful public buildings and wide cobblestone streets.

Helsinki has a population of over 1.1 million and it situation on the tip of a peninsula and on 315 islands. Outside the inner city many suburbs are separated by patches of forest. It has one of the highest urban standards of living in the world.

We walked around the city centre and noticed the entrance to most

stores was through a heated vestibule; not really necessary in August as the weather was a beautiful 15 degrees. We also found tiny entrances to underground shopping often supermarkets. It’s a challenge to find everyday items when you don’t have any brand recognition or knowledge of a language. Having said that, the Finnish speak excellent English. On one street we saw some amazing buskers playing the violin and cello. Having had enough fish for the day we found an Irish pub and had some lunch.

In the afternoon we met up with our tour and noticed immediately that we were, without doubt, the youngest in the group – despite John’s shiny dome and my now Arctic white hair (grey). We met the tour guide Suzanne (Dutch) and coach driver Arni (Norwegian). After a quick introduction and visit to the coach to identify our seats we left

Suzanne answering multiple strange questions by other passengers. It’s a shame we didn’t have a real "meet and greet" on Day One as we would have been able to find “our people” a lot quicker than we did for reasons that will become obvious.

The following morning we saw the city hall, parliament house, presidential palace and the very impressive neoclassical Lutheran Cathedral. Carl Engel and Alvar Aalto are famous Finnish designers. We saw a lot of sculptures representing something significant (we didn’t always understand them) including an impressive whale sculpture in the city and out of town the Sibelius Monument made of 600 hollow steel pipes welded together.

We walked along the waterfront and visited a fish market which also sold non-fish delicacies such as canned bear and elk pate. We had lunch on the waterfront watched over closely by some large, aggressive and hungry looking seagulls.

Next: Arctic Circle Tour – Helsinki to Kuopio