Helsinki, Finland

Helsinki was bright, sunny, and full of people when we arrived, which was a welcome change after gray, empty Stockholm. Continuing in the theme of staying in places that used to be other places, we got a room at the Academica Hostel, which is actually a student dormitory during the academic year. After dropping our stuff off there, we went to the harbor-side market for some food and a nice waltz, courtesy of an accordion busker. Nearby we were entertained by a street performer with trained cats, which jumped into baskets, climbed things, etc. Hilarious, because even though they were doing all this, they were still just cats, and you know how cats are. Then we hopped on a bus for a recorded audio tour of the city (first one ever available in Latin). It was a good way to get oriented a bit and see a few of the sights.

I had really been looking forward to seeing the Sibelius monument. Not only do I have good associations with a certain piece of his music, but it was the first thing that gave me the idea of coming to Finland at all, when I saw it on an old postcard of Grandma Jackie's. And I do like it in person as well. I would never have thought a bunch of steel tubes could be that lovely. On a side note, the head of Sibelius that you can see off to the side was tacked on as a later addition to the real monument. The artist was trying to shut up all the critics who were heckling her about it all being too abstract.

Of all the churches I've ever been in, Temppeliaukio -- the Temple in the Rock -- may be my favorite. It's literally hewn right into the solid rock of the hillside, with sunlight coming in through the 13 miles of coiled copper wire in the ceiling. And the acoustics are beautiful as well, as demonstrated by a lady playing Chopin on the piano when we were there. Would have been lovely to hear the organ. But just being right there in the earth and peaceful is what I loved the most about it.

At the opposite end of the church spectrum, we also visited the Uspenski Orthodox Cathedral. I did love the outside of this, with the excellent shades of red, green and gold. But the inside is all the overwhelming, overdone, orthodox style that tends to just turn me off. I can't really relate to it.

Museum-wise, the National Museum of Finland had some good historical exhibits and was fairly interesting and educational. But the Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum was the real winner. They have no permanent collection, so I don't know what it might be like at any other time, but when we were there it was excellent. I love modern art, but usually in a panning for gold kind of way. I was impressed with how many nuggets the Kiasma had. Without listing all of the fascinating things there, I just want to describe one of the real winners: Songlines. This is a metal globe with raised outlines of the continents. A motor rotates the globe in its frame, along one side of which is a row of small, metal reeds, like on a thumb piano. As the continents rotate, they pluck out different melodies on the reeds. Higher notes are in the North, and lower ones in the South, so that you get, for instance, a huge bass boom when the coast of Chile goes by. Absolutely brilliant, and fascinating to just watch and listen to.

We happened to be lucky and find a dance to go to on our last night in Helsinki. A local dance association was holding one of its regular social dances out near the Sibelius Park. We were running late from our earlier excursions, and we had trouble finding the place, but we still managed to get a couple hours of dancing in there. The band was accordion, drums, and bass/vocals, and the dancers were mostly middle-aged and up, though we did find a couple of other nice 20-somethings as well. People there spoke varying amounts of English, which was kind of cool to finally have to deal with, since absolutely everybody in touristy areas speaks English impeccably. A few folks also made an effort to help us out learning the customs and etiquette. Like the lady I almost insulted by only dancing one dance with. All dances there are done in pairs, two dances in a row with the same partner, and the band plays in pairs as well (two tangos, two waltzes, etc.) to help you keep track. Then there's ladies' hour from about 10-11pm, when the ladies get to ask the men for dances (though opinion seemed to be divided on whether this also included escorting them back to their seats).

As for the dances themselves, I'd heard before the trip that the tango is practically the national dance of Finland, and there were certainly a lot of them. I had worried a bit about not really knowing tango very well, but it turns out that the way it's done there is basically like a glorified foxtrot. So my basic American tango and leading skills got me through just fine. Actually, a lot of their dances seem to drift towards foxtrottiness, and you can kind of forget what you're actually watching sometimes, because it all looks so similar. You can tell the waltzes apart, though. And there was something called a humppa which seemed like a turning two-step polka, though I'm sure there are stylistic differences I couldn't pick up on the fly.

By the way, two useful Finnish words to have at a dance: anteeksi (excuse me) and kiitos (thank you). Everything else you can just mime.

Baltic Ferries

Going between Sweden and Finland, we took the overnight cruise ships, which turned out to be pretty fun. I recommend going between Stockholm and Helsinki, though, rather than Stockholm and Turku. We did it both ways and the latter is a shorter trip with less time to really get the cruise ship experience, plus they roll you out of bed at 6 AM. We got a complimentary or accidental room upgrade or something on the Helsinki trip as well, which might color my perception of it a bit, but I still liked that trip better. We were on the Silja line, which means a giant blue boat, rather than the Viking line, which would be a giant red boat. Though perhaps there are other differences as well.

To imagine one of these cruise ships, take a hotel, a mall, a sauna, a casino, a nightclub, some restaurants and bars, and then moosh them all together and make the whole thing float. I don't know how many people they get on those things, but it's gotta be a lot. If you walk up on the deck, you get lovely views of all the little islands in the archipelago around Stockholm, or you can see midnight sunsets later in the evening. The rooms we had were pretty small, with beds that collapse into the walls, so you can decide between being able to lay down or turn around. I'm not sure how big and fancy the more expensive ones get, but our upgraded room did at least have a nice window overlooking the main "promenade" (i.e. shopping mall) of the ship. Wandering around the mall and restaurants and duty-free shops is interesting for a short while, but not for too long. Luckily, there was some other fun to be found.

There was a small stage and dance floor at one end of the first ship we were on. I poked my head in there a couple times during the evening, and noticed some show that seemed to have people in pirate costumes dancing to different sorts of music each time. Miriam and I went back later, though, and found a band playing and people dancing. They were mostly playing a bunch of "oldies," with some swing-able stuff early on, followed by more tangos, foxtrots, and slow dances later. We managed to get a decent little dance fix out of it. One really amusing moment came during a waltz when I was confused about why absolutely everybody suddenly wanted to dance in the same corner as us. Turns out these ships are so big it's easy to forget sometimes that you're actually out on the ocean. Until the dance floor tilts.

After dancing, we found a bunch of karaoke going on in another part of the ship. This turned out to be fascinating because the majority of the songs were in either Finnish or Russian (though occasionally English with one of those accents). It was really fun to hear pop music from other countries, and to watch all the foreign words going by on the screens. I tried to remember some of the lyrics long enough to write them down when we got back to our room. Now we'll see how well I did by googling for them and seeing if I can find the songs to listen to again.

I'll mention the ferry between Helsinki and Tallinn as well, as long as I'm here, though it was rather different, being more like a glorified bus and not a huge cruise ship. The one interesting thing about it was the music video showing on a screen when we boarded. It had a catchy little tune and this bizarre animation with hippo-dog things holding umbrellas. I really want to find that song again, and Miriam managed to jot down the main melody, but that's all we've got. After that one, they just showed American music videos from the '80's and '90's for the rest of the trip, so less interesting.

Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm bookended our trip, with a weekend at the beginning and a camp-recovery evening at the end. Unfortunately, we got there on a gray, drizzly midsummers-holiday weekend, which pretty much turns Stockholm into a ghost town. So I think we got rather an unfair impression of it. I love the archipelaginess of it, though, and getting to cross different bits of water to get to different islands.

The Af Chapman is a ship that was converted into a hostel, so that seemed like a fun place to stay. Unfortunately, it's closed for renovations, so we stayed in the Långholmens Hostel, instead, which is a converted prison. Not so bad as it sounds, though. It has a small, interesting museum that lets you compare what it was like in the prison days with the way it is now, and it's also on a lovely little island with very nice wooded paths to stroll around. And some of the rooms have interesting decorations. Like the guillotine on the mirror, and the old newspaper prints on the underside of the upper bunks. It was a bit away from the city center (in "Stockholm's Brooklyn") but not too bad.

Friday we mostly took it easy, dealing with jet lag, but did walk around the old town island of Gamla Stan for a while. Saw some nice churches, and a statue of St. George and the Dragon which I quite liked. The dragon is made out of lots of elk antlers, which gives it a wonderful look.

On Saturday we went to the Vasa Museum, built around the Vasa warship, which was the Titanic of the Scandinavian 17th century. Someone built a huge, impressive ship, then miscalculated how many rocks they needed as ballast. It got top heavy, tipped over, and sank when it was barely out of the harbor on its maiden voyage. It was found, pulled up from the ocean floor, and restored several decades ago. You can see it in the museum, along with tons of other fascinating exhibits about it and about seafaring life generally in the time period. The video about the recovery is very interesting, and well worth the half hour. I also enjoyed the wax reconstructions of some of the people whose skeletons were found on board. The display about how that was done says that while they obviously can't determine hair color or anything, they can get good enough reconstructions to be recognizable by someone who knew the person. Amazing. In the "Completely Random" department, there was a photo of our governator as Conan the Barbarian. No explanation whatsoever on why that was in a 17th century Swedish warship museum.

A ways down the street from the museum (having missed the entrance to Skansen, which we'll come back to later) we found a small Italian restaurant. This had the best pizza ever. Maybe it was something about the crust, or the sauce, or just some magic pixie dust they sprinkled on it, but it was incredible.

We continued wandering around the parks on Djurgården and found a nice rose garden, mostly notable for a lemon-scented rose. We also came across a small playground with one of these things that are so much fun. (Anybody know what they're called?) Being a damp day, the slugs were out in force. Swedish slugs are large ugly things, like banana slugs, if you let the bananas get old and black. They appeared to be cannibalistic as well.

We eventually made it back to Skansen in the evening. This is a large "open air museum," basically a park with a lot of things like reconstructions of old villages and whatnot in it. There's also a small zoo that provided some great views of bears and moose and other critters. We were rather cold and wet by this point, but wanted to stick around for the folk dancing that happens on one of the little stages in the park. At 8pm some musicians set up and started playing lovely Scandinavian tunes under a gazebo, while a couple brave dancers hambo'd and schottisched through the rain. I was starved at this point and eating a sandwich from a nearby shop. I gobbled it up as fast as I could, then we dashed over to join the dancing. Literally as soon as we set foot on the stage, the musicians wrapped up their current tune and started putting their instruments away. Ouch. I guess they decided 15 minutes was enough in that kind of weather. Really disappointing, though. It would have been fun to surprise folks with some American kids that knew the hambo.

Things brightened up on Sunday when, appropriately enough, the sun came out. We went out to Millesgården, former home of sculptor Carl Milles, and now a wonderful museum and park full of his work. He was influenced a lot by Rodin, but took everything in a much more mythological, fantastical direction. Some of it I like more than others, but it's all fascinating.

Conveniently, Millesgården is over on the side of Stockholm near the Värtan harbor, from which we'd be sailing to Helsinki. So having earlier stashed our larger bags in lockers at a train station, we were all set to go board the cruise ship Sunday afternoon. More on that next post.

Not Impressed

Just got back from seeing The Order of the Phoenix. Appropriately enough, my least favorite book became my least favorite movie (so far), though for different reasons. It was really just very poorly done all around. Everything felt extremely under-acted, as if most of the actors weren't even trying to get into their emotions (look at how upset Uncle Vernon barely is about the attack on Dudley, for instance). People looked bad in completely fixable ways (e.g. costume or makeup details, or lighting and camera angles). None of the magic special effects were at all impressive, and the Dumbledore-Voldemort duel was pitiful. (Can't we have just a little bit of choreography in there, please?) The story editing is admittedly a very tough job, but it still just felt gaping and ragged, with everybody rushing just to cover the cliff's-notes version of it. I really hope some more effort gets put into movie #6. I'm okay having 5 as a throwaway one if we have to, but I want 6 to be good.

I'll stop complaining now. On the plus side, I'll say that Luna Lovegood did a great job, and I also loved the thestrels.

And yes, trip-blogging should happen soon, I just haven't yet had the energy for it.

Back in the States

Arrived in New York this afternoon. Currently battling jet lag and an illness that attacked me the last half of the trip, so probably nothing interesting will be happening here for me. Heading home tomorrow morning and will perhaps try to do some proper trip-blogging later this week.

Also, we found out late in the trip that someone early on had sold us the wrong denomination of postcard stamps. So I don't know how many people will be getting postcards. :-( If you do get one with a stamp with no number on it (as opposed to one that says 11kr) let me know. I saw a piece of mail with insufficient postage go through once, just for lack of a return address, so you never know.