Helsinki in a Hurry

Continued from << Part 1

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Having stayed on deck until we were actually docked, we then headed back to our cabin to pack up for the day, and so doing missed the initial rush of disembarkation. So we instead had a leisurely stroll down the long gangway to the Katajanokka Terminal, a reasonable modern if still somewhat under construction terminal building which serves not just Viking Line but a couple of smaller ferries as well. We had hoped to arrive at the Makasiini Terminal, which is on the other side of the harbor and thus only a couple of blocks from the Tourist Info center, where you can purchase a day pass for the busses and trams. It turns out we needn't have worried, though, as there was a ticket machine just outside the Viking Terminal which had English instructions. Two minutes later, and 12EUR lighter in the pocket, we were armed with a pair of 24 hour bus passes and on our way to the nearest tram stop.

While you have to show your ticket when boarding a bus, the trams work solely on the enforced honor system: usually no one asks for your ticket, but if you can't produce one when asked you're liable for an 80€ fine. It certainly makes boarding easier, as you can just climb on through any of the doors instead of waiting in line at the front to pay the driver or show a pass. We hopped the number 4T, which headed back towards downtown through a neighborhood of lovely Art Nouveau apartment blocks. Just after the Lutheran Cathedral, we came to our stop, and this is when we learned first hand something that I had read online and then forgotten: if you're going to be a little slow getting off the tram in Helsinki, make sure you sit in the front. The driver opens and closes the front doors, but the rest of the doors close automatically, so if you hesitate they'll slam right in your face. After some help from the locals, though, we managed to get off the tram without further incident.

In retrospect, the Tourist Info place was, perhaps, not entirely necessary as a first stop. After all, we already had our bus passes, and a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do with the 6 hours or so until we needed to be back on board. We picked up a little bit of literature for things we wouldn't be seeing this time, as well as one useful item: a map of the tram routes. Then we headed off to hop the 3T tram, which makes a big figure 8 past most of the major tourist sights in the city.

Our destination of choice was Temppeliaukio, the Church in the Rocks, a large domed church built right into the native bedrock. Sure, it's the most popular tourist destination in Helsinki, as evidenced by the stream of busses coming and going during our brief visit, but it's just too cool to miss. The raw rock walls are topped with a massive copper dome (made of 22 km of copper stripping), and the combination gives it excellent acoustics. There was a young woman alternately playing the violin and piano while we were there, and there really didn't seem to be a bad seat in the place.

After the church we decided to ride the tram the long way around to get a view of the city before heading back into the center for lunch. We missed the next tram by a minute, but fortunately they run every ten minutes or so. Helsinki public transit really pushes the 3T as the tourist tram, a cheap way to see the sights, and it does run an interesting route; the problem is that it's jam packed with locals all day, and it's hard to enjoy the scenery when the tram is standing room only and whipping around tight corners. It did take us past the Olympic stadium and pool before plunging back into the downtown area, but I didn't manage to see much else that has really stuck with me.

By this time it was probably 1:00 or so, and time to get some food. Of course, by just backtracking a block we could check out the cool Workers Commemoration Statue, and then another block back to snap a shot of a cool facade, and by then we had walked back and forth in front of the windows of Stockmann, Helsinki's most famous department store, enough times that we felt the need to go in for a quick look. This is apparently the place to shop for everything from high-end Finnish ceramics to a good axe. An hour later, weighed down by the smallest possible collection of souvenirs as well as the knowledge that cool Finnish ceramics and glass like iitala are just way expensive, it was definitely time for lunch.

We set off down the esplanade, a broad tree lined boulevard surrounded by luxury shopping of all sorts. At the far end was the eatery Jennifer had picked out, Kappeli, which has a bar, a cafe, and a restaurant all housed in a Nouveau conservatory in the middle of the park, with a large and extremely popular terrace that fronts a band shell. The terrace was crazy busy, so we opted for the cafe, a much quieter and cooler affair where we got a tuna sandwich, chef's salad, bread, a couple of coffees and a slice of apple cake for the low, low price of €16.

By the time we were done soaking in Kappeli's atmosphere, it was past 3:00, and time to start thinking about final stops before heading back to the ship. We wandered over to the Lutheran Cathedral (by way of a fountain of seals spitting at a woman rising out of a school of fish), and admired both it and the statue of Tsar Alexander II outside it, but opted not to climb the many steps just to see its reportedly spare interior. Instead, we caught a tram back to Katajanokka, where we wandered the interesting buildings for an hour or so (finding one door watched over by a parliament of owls and another by a helmeted chappie, not to mention the coolest drug store sign ever) until it was time to get back on board.

Not a lot of time in Helsinki, but enough to see that we could happily come back and spend a few days wandering around.

Conclusion: Goodbye Helsinki >>

Come Helsinki O'er High Water...

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When your coffee breaks start lasting for an hour, you know it's time to take a vacation. So I took this week off from work to recharge, and we decided to take a trip to Helsinki. Joe found us some tickets on Viking Line, which is one of the companies that specializes in trips around the Baltic. Due to unusually low booking for this particular trip, we got a pretty good deal, 900SEK for both of us for two nights, in a cabin above the waterline. (Normally the cheapest accomodations are one deck below the car deck, with shared facilities.)

The cruise line runs a bus service from Uppsala directly to their dock on Södermalm in Stockholm, so our journey began a little incongruously by catching a bus in the parking lot of the Willys grocery store on Uppsala's west side. As luck had it, the city bus I take to work every day runs right to this pick-up point; after a somewhat sweaty commute, the Viking bus was quite comfortable (and air conditioned!). An hour later we were at the docks, and I at least gawped like a yokel at the size of our ship, the Mariella (which was in turn quite a bit smaller than many other ships we would see on the voyage). Humiliation and plundering of the guests began immediately, as there was a fellow with a camera taking pictures of everyone as they enter the glass-enclosed gangway and pass under a cheesy "Welcome Aboard" sign (if you can find yours pinned to the public bulletin board, you can have it taken down for only 5€/50SEK!). At least the clowns with balloons at the door of the ship itself left us alone.

We found our cabin (a B2P on level 4, in case you're still looking at the schematic) to drop off our stuff, then ran back out to grab seats for departure. Many people come on these cruises for the sole purpose of purchasing alcohol, for immediate (and future) consumption—more on that later!— for now, suffice it to say that the open-air bar on level 8 was already hoppin' by the time we got there, and we ended up stowing ourselves on a south-facing locker for the first hour or so of the voyage. The journey from Stockholm goes thorough the extensive system of islands that make up the Stockholm archipelago, and once the city ends, the coast seems to be one nice house after another either on the water, or perched on a cliff just above the water. McMansions were few; most houses were smaller and obviously older, although many had been refit with larger windows. Most have a dock, and many had at least a boathouse as well. There were plenty of people out sunning themselves on beaches (and waving at the big boats), and plenty of pleasure craft out and about as well (often also full of people waving at the big boats).

Space cleared out after a while, as fellow passengers headed in for dinner, and we moved up to deck 11, the top deck, which gave us a panoramic view. The cooler temperature was very pleasant after the heat of the day, but the coolness (and hunger) eventually drove us back to our cabin to put on warmer clothes (and fetch the picnic dinner we had packed along). We stopped at level 6 on our way down, to check out the duty free store (massive, perfume-laden, full of alcohol and chocolate but including more exotic things like Finnish glassware and a freezer full of meat) and cafe (which we hoped to hit for breakfast the next morning). Although the duty free was full of tempting junk food (Pringles! Coke!), the checkout lines were so long that we decided to save the foreign treats for later, and so headed back up to deck 11 for dinner. The islands did not peter out for several hours.

Joe ran back to the store for dessert, Finnish chocolate (quite sweet) and a Danish beer (yuck!). We stayed up on deck to watch the sunset, and then we got our first glimpse of Finland, as the southern and eastern islands of the Åland group hove into sight. We pulled into the small dock at the town of Mariehamn at about 20:30 Stockholm time, dwarfing one of our sister ships (the Rosella), and then being dwarfed in turn by the enormous Symphony of the rival Silja line, which had been close on our heels ever since departure. We stayed up on deck for a while after that, looking at the few stars you could see in the south and east, and the slowly dimming remnants of the sunset. Eventually we remembered the time change (Helsinki is one hour ahead) and since we hoped to get an early start to see the Finnish coast as we approached Helsinki, we headed to bed around midnight, even though it was still light out.

Our cabin was quite far astern, and, as it turned out, two levels directly above the aft propeller. Perhaps this was a slight improvement over our below-the-waterline cabin on Vesterålen, when we were directly above the forward steering propellers, but still, the almost but not quite regular humming of the engine was distracting at first. Good thing we had had plenty of fresh air and sunshine to help us get to sleep.

We were due to dock in Helsinki at 09:45, so we got up a couple hours before that to head up on deck. The day was already quite light (at these latitudes, an inside cabin without a window is a blessing not a shortcoming), and the Finnish coast quite close. I snagged some chairs on deck 11 again, while Joe went to the cafe (and stood in line for a while), but soon appeared bearing delicious pastries, a wrapped sandwich, yogurt, and fruit for breakfast. The southern coast of Finland appears to be well populated, but more with industry than with houses. As we came into port, the ship slowed to the thread the narrow channel between islands and we got fantastic view of the 18th century Swedish fortress on Suomenlinna. (When we come back, we plan to do what everyone else does and take a picnic lunch out to the walls.) The harbor was bustling with many smaller local ferries, including one called SuperSeaCat, with its memorably fierce artwork. A couple minutes of careful maneuvering, and there we were. Welcome to Helsinki!

Part 2: Helsinki in a Hurry >>

Moving Part III: At the Sign of the Bloodstone

We've been here a few weeks now, so I guess we're as settled in as we're going to get. High time to get around to describing our new digs.

This apartment is definitely larger, about 20% larger actually, but naturally we've expanded to fill the space in the few short weeks we've been here. The most welcome space is in the kitchen. Those of you who have seen any of our previous kitchens will no doubt recognize that I'm not saying much when I state that this is the largest kitchen we've had in our life together, but I'll take it a step further and say that this is the first time we've been able to work in the kitchen side by side. It also has a space for a table, with a roughly south facing window and door opening out onto our small balkong, great for growing a few kitchen window herbs.

Having the table out of the living room adds a lot of space to that room as well, despite it actually being pretty much exactly the same size as the last. The living room also has a larger window, which is nice, and we've made a pretty cozy sitting area clustered around the brighter half of the room. The window is also the room's drawback: we're on the first floor now, and the entrance to the building can only be reached by walking right past our window, which oddly lacks blinds. Our first week we spent a lot of time accidentally meeting the glances of all our neighbors as they walked past our couch, but eventually I got the curtains finished, and with the judicious application of some translucent window film along the lower edge of the window we now have a reasonable amount of privacy with no appreciable loss of light.

It's a little thing, I know, but my favorite part of the living room is the door leading to the hallway. In a more modern apartment it would probably just be an empty archway, but this building dates from the mid-sixties, so instead we have a door-and-a-half, both with a glass panel for the upper two thirds of the door. It serves no real purpose—the only reason I can think that we would close the door would be to use the front room as a guest room, and in that case the glass panels are less than optimal—but it adds a little charm to the place.

The winner in the charm category has to be the hallway light fixture, though. Groovy, man.

There is quite a bit more closet space here, although it's oddly broken up into a series of cabinets, some in the smaller bedroom (which we've moved into, for that very reason) but mostly in the hallway. A lot of the cabinets have strange wooden drawers or oddly shaped dividers built in, so we're still trying to figure out where to put everything.

Speaking of storage, with the new place we've also acquired some basement space. There's a bicycle/pram storage room which may be handy if the snow starts. Every apartment in the building also comes with its own little storage area, complete with chicken wire dividers and gates. Ours is bizarrely located in a dim little corridor hidden behind this serious looking doorway. I would like to think it's an old bomb shelter—the building is from the 60s, recall—but then why does it only seal from the outside?

Working Conditions Part II

So it's summer and the weather has turned sunny and hot. Why, it got up to a high of 26°C today.

In these conditions (maybe the fact that the boss is on vacation this week helps), the overall work rate has slowed to a snail's pace. There are lots of nice big yellow land snails around here, so I now have a basis for understanding this cliche. (Actually they can move faster than I'd thought.) This morning, on my floor of the department, there were only foreigners and two Swedish staff members, one of whom just got back from 3 weeks vacation, and the other of whom starts her vacation this Friday. The latter confessed that she is counting the hours.

It turns out that the proper timing of fika depends crucially on the instincts of the natives. Left to our own devices, we poor foreigners tend to put off fika for just five minutes, then just five minutes more—"Hang on, let me send this email," and other, similar five-minute-long delaying tactics—and so morning fika didn't get going until almost 10:30. By the time you're done with that, well, it's almost lunchtime.

Sigh.

We've been here a full six months now, and I am still not fully adjusted to working conditions.

Double Vision

What's that they're building in the parking lot of the Uppsala Ikea?

Yes, it's another Ikea. I suddenly feel like I'm living in a Starbucks joke.

Two Swedens

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Click a pushpin for a picture from that spot; click the picture for a full-sized image.

Well, we're all moved in to our new place, but meanwhile summer is flying by, and it's high time for us to start using some of Jennifer's copious vacation time. With that in mind, Tuesday we took a trip to Skokloster Castle on Lake Mälaren.

To get there, we went downriver on the m/s Kung Carl Gustaf, a tourist boat which departs downtown Uppsala for Skokloster daily during the summer (this is the yellow line on the map above). The trip takes about 2 hours one way, and costs 150 SEK per person, more if you want to eat the optional lunch on board (we took the more economical "pack a lunch" route). Boarding started at 10:30, but by the time we got there at 10:35 all the best seats were taken; nevertheless we managed to squeeze onto a bench along one side of the observation deck, wedged in between a loud British family and a quieter pair of German women. It was very strange to be back in tourist mode, even as we sailed past places we see all the time, like the football stadium where our local women's side loses (er, plays) games.

After a few minutes we were in new territory, moving through the farmland south of the city. It's all very bucolic, cows having a drink and a rest alongside the river, red barns across open fields, cars stopped at bridges that have been swung out of our way as we pass.

Past the farms we encountered a large marsh, which is kept as a nature preserve. It was full of ducks, and some sort of diving gulls, and quite a few herons. Oddly, though, no turtles, as it turns out that Scandinavia has no native turtles. Go figure.

After an hour we made Lake Mälaren, a large lake that runs all the way to Stockholm, but in dozens of little fingers. Here we picked up speed, which, combined with the stiff breeze off the lake, meant it was suddenly a bit parky on the deck, so we were able to claim better seats as the bulk of the foreign tourists (and all but a handful of the hearty, Viking-descended locals) headed for more sheltered climes. The lake was choppy, but not so much as to make the ride uncomfortable. Plenty of breeze for the sailboats and windsurfers we passed along the way, though.

After a while we left the open water to wind through a few smaller passages, affording us close-ups of the residences of the poor souls who, unable apparently to afford stugas in the woods, have been forced to settle for comfortable lake houses with gorgeous views. Oh, and seaplanes. Musn't forget the seaplanes.

Skokloster appeared about twenty minutes before we arrived, exacty as it is supposed to do. The castle was built in the latter half of the 17th century by Field Marshall Carl Gustaf Wrangel, although he died before it was completed. Interestingly, when he died work stopped on the castle, and the large banqueting hall on the third floor remains just as the workers left it, the interior work hardly even started, a scaffolding standing in one corner. The middle of the 17th century was Sweden's Great Power era, the fifty years or so in all of European history when Sweden was counted as one of the great players in world events. This was also the time when Sweden was at its largest, including not only Finland but most of the Baltic coast, all of that taken by force, and those victories in the field translated to a lot of wealth coming back to the homeland. In turn, much of that wealth was funneled into the building of stately homes around Lake Mälaren, which was essentially Stockholm's 17th century highway system. So all of these homes are built overlooking the lake, and designed to be seen from the water.

When we arrived, most of the passengers were whisked away by the awaiting tour guides (admission is by guided tour only). The boat arrives at 12:45 and departs at 14:30, so there really isn't much time to spare if you want to squeeze an hour-long tour in there. With this in mind, we had decided to skip the return trip, spend the afternoon at the castle, and then make our way back by bus in the evening. So we bid farewell to our fellow passengers, and instead set off to find a pleasant picnic spot. We chose a nice flat rock up on a hill, with good views of the lake and the castle (and a reasonably manageable amount of ants), and proceeded to picnic: chicken sandwiches, carrot sticks, clementines, and a couple of cookies, with juice boxes to wash it all down. Well, they looked like juice boxes, anyway. They turned out to be 2 dl tetra pack boxes of juice concentrate (just add a liter of water!). We played a little shell game with one of the water bottles we'd brought along and managed to make a bit of drinkable juice, but not before Jennifer had taken a big swig of the straight stuff. Ugh.

We just made the 14:15 English language tour. Unfortunately there are no pictures, as there is no photography allowed in the castle, but we had a nice one hour walk through three floors of the castle, led by Andreas, who seemed to be pretty knowledgeable. The castle has belonged to a few different families over the centuries, and didn't pass into state hands until the 1960s, but for all that there are a lot of original features remaining. My favorite was the painted plaster relief dragon on the ceiling of the formal dining room, which was breathing out the chandelier like a plume of flame. Jennifer's favorite part was in the armory on the top floor, a three room collection put together by Wrangel 350 years ago and still together. It included a few unusual items, like a hammock from Southeast Asia, a handful of rare animal specimens (specifically a blowfish, an armadillo, and a rattlesnake, all unusual for 16th century Europe, and I assume selected for their offensive/defensive traits), and best of all, a 17th century sealskin kayak from Greenland.

Another interesting feature of the castle is the writing on the walls. Wrangel probably started it by putting a few quotes from significant Roman emperors over the first floor doors, but his grandson took things a step further, adding a couple of hundred quotations to wall panels all over the castle. Half are in Latin, with the remainder a mix a of German, Swedish, French, and English. It was strange to turn a corner in Sweden and suddenly see:

But one misfortune alone is true, that of being by misfortune subdued.

At least that one makes sense, unlike:

Let him ask and speak who knowing is and would thus be called.

One other item that bears mentioning: Skokloster castle is the home of Arcimboldo's painting of Rudolf II's head as Vertumnus (you know, the one where his head is made of a bunch of vegetables). Why does an Italian painter's portrait of a Holy Roman Emperor who ruled from Prague reside in a castle in Sweden? It goes back to Sweden's Great Power period again. In 1648 the Swedish army sacked Prague on its way home from the Thirty Years War, mainly because Queen Christina was an avid collector just like Rudolf II had been, and she wanted his stuff. So the army came away with a lot of Rudolf' collection as booty, including the Vertumnus.

Well, that's one Sweden. Our journey into the other Sweden started with the bus stop outside the castle, scenically located in between the parking lot and the gas station. We've obviously been taking the city buses a lot since we got here, but this was our first ride on a regional bus, the intermediate step between the city buses and the long distance bus companies like Swebuss and Ybuss. Today we were on an Upplands Lokaltraffik Regional bus, #894 specifically (the blue line), which runs from Skokloster south to the town of Bålsta for just 50 SEK per person (even though Skokloster is south of Uppsala, we had to leave it by going further south still, as it is on a peninsula). This took us through sparsely inhabited forest land until we started to reach the outskirts of Bålsta.

We got off at Yttergrans Kyrka to await the #895 to Uppsala (the red line). We could have changed in Bålsta, but the way the buses are scheduled we would have arrived 5 minutes after the #895 departed, and had to wait another 30 minutes to catch the next one. So instead, Yttergrans Kyrka, better known as the back end of nowhere. It's a slightly disconcerting experience, getting off a bus in a foreign country at a stop which consists of nothing more than a post on the side of the road, with no idea what exactly you'll do if you've judged it wrong and there is no other bus coming to take you home. Well, I find it disconcerting anyway. After 15 minutes or so, the #895 rolled around the bend, and after shelling out another 75 SEK apiece we were on our way to Uppsala.

So why do I call it another Sweden? Historically, communications in Sweden have always been by water, leaving the farmland of the interior isolated. I want to call it a backwater, although that isn't quite right as the point is that it doesn't have water. Obviously water routes have been replaced by freeways now, but there still seems to be a lingering cultural distance between the land-locked areas and the rest of Sweden. It's Scandinavian design versus broken furniture on porches; slim black coats versus overalls and baseball caps; shiny Volvos versus rusted out Citroens. This is the Sweden of which the Germans love to make fun. Everything's a little run down, a little seedy, and more than a little muddy.

All that, and home by 19:00. As Calvin once said, "I consider this day seized and throttled."