Travel

[KathyPet]

I think you will find Helsinki a huge disappointment after Stockholm.

[Stray]

@World Traveler- I absolutely loved Scandinavia ....Stockholm is a wonderful city....

[World Traveler]

Sunday - July 16 - Leaving Stockholm for Helsinki, Finland

This morning we had a city tour by bus, visiting inside the city hall. It is a beautiful hall; in fact, it is quite lavish. This is where their government officials have their meetings once a month, and we saw the room where all of their representatives sit and discuss the country's issues.

There are rooms for huge banquets and they could even have a ballroom-style setting in one room. The walls in some rooms are mosaic and the architecture is amazing to see. I am glad that we were able to take the time to go inside. We also did a little walking tour of the Old Town near the palace.

By the time we finished, we all (86!) went to eat at Kvarnen, which I understand is the setting for part of the book Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She would frequent this restaurant. I finally was able to have Swedish meatballs (very good!) and some other great food there.

Our local guide, not our program director, mentioned some more things about vacation. Other than the normal five weeks of vacation all employees get, after age 40 you get even more vacation. Now that's my kind of country! Sometimes it is an extra week, but it can be more.

Students are out of school eight weeks of the year.

Around 3:30 in the afternoon, we were brought to the ship and what a nice ship it is. I love my room and there is plenty of area to not feel claustrophobic.

My bathroom is a nice size for a ship. There is plenty of closet and drawer space, and I completely emptied out my suitcase. Found stuff in there that I forgot I packed four weeks ago!

We have already had our safety drill and we will be having a port talk on Helsinki soon, followed by dinner.

This is on the menu: Beetroot carpaccio, green salad, soup (Lohikeitto, which is a creamy soup of salmon, potatoes, and dill), baked turkey breast, broiled fillet of halibut, quiche gardeniere, pasta con fungi, tarte tatin (upside down baked apple pie), assorted ice cream with apple sauce, fresh fruit plate, and cheese plate.

I am especially looking forward to the ice cream, as the 16th is National Ice Cream Day. So perhaps a double doss of ice cream is in order!

YAY!!!!!! I was able to upload pictures.....FINALLY!!!! This is a part of my cabin room, with a bottle of champagne provided (I don't drink, so that will be given to someone else!). Do you see the five pieces of chocolate on the desk? G-o-n-e!!!!

Well, the only way I have figured out to work around the photo posting thing is to email them to myself, then save them, then upload them. Would prefer that I just transfer them from my camera directly to my iPad, as in the past, but this will have to do. Not sure I will go back and do that with all my photos taken thus far and of possible interest to you, but at least I can post some from this point on.

[Alter Ego]

Yay! You found a workaround for the photos!

The room looks nice - new and modern. Nice size closet.

[gacat123]

@World Traveler 

GORGEOUS!   Is that a mirror over the bed?  <G> 

DH is in South Dakota on business trip. He went early for some personal travel time.  

WALL DRUGSTORE is in WALL, SD and is a famous landmark - CrackerBarrel before CB! 

Enjoying your travel journal very much - THANK YOU!  

OH and you are missing  Christmas in July on QVC but that may be a good thing?  HA! 

Keep Calm and Travel On,   

CAT

[World Traveler]

@gacat123 Mirror over the bed! LOL!!!! Well, I had to check the photo again to see where you got that; and sure enough, it does look like a mirror. No, just a reflection off the window/drapes. Guess they really high polish everything in this room.

And yes, @Alter Ego lots of closet space. In fact, also in the bathroom there is a lot of cupboard and vanity spaces. I used the shower this morning and could not believe how much room there is in that separate compartment. The water pressure was great and I thought I could just camp out right there, it was that good!

I am quite sure I have a room meant for two people, but because I have traveled with this company so many times, they try to reward you by upgrading your rooms in hotels, and evidently on the ship too, when they can. 

And the room on one side of me is the area where they keep the sheets, towels, etc.; so I have no noise coming from there. And on the other side, I can vaguely hear the people talking, but the soundproofing is quite good. I slept well the first night.

All in all, I am quite pleased with the room, the size of the ship, and how attentive the staff is. I know they are working for their tips, but after less than 24 hours on the ship, several of them are calling me by my first name and joking around with me. Their homework the first night must be to memorize everyone's name!

[World Traveler]

Monday July 17 - At Sea - Helsinki, Finland

After a great meal last night on board the ship, I had an opportunity to speak with one of the other program directors. She too is from Russia, but has lots of ties to Finland and I was curious about some of the things I had heard.

For instance, I heard that Finns do not communicate with each other. I wanted to know what that meant. She said she could well address that because her parents were that way. She gave the example of the husband and wife sitting down in the living room watching TV. She often saw her mother decide to get up and go into the kitchen to get something to eat, perhaps more of what she was snacking on. As she stood she would look at her husband and just say "want more?" and without looking at her, he would either shake his head no or nod his head to indicate yes. No words from him. And her "want more" was never anything like "I am going into the kitchen, would you like me to get you something." It was just "want more?"

So I asked how courtship was if Finns didn't communicate much. Oh, that was a different story; they were very good at communicating until they got married. They have the attitude when they get married that you should not need to communicate much after that. It is like, as she said, the husband saying: "I love you. If anything changes, I will let you know." LOL!!!!!

Breakfast this morning was awesome with what we were told is a Finnish favorite, blueberry pancakes. Of course, I needed to see if that as true and thoroughly enjoyed them!

After breakfast we had a chance to attend a talk about Finland, our first stop of the cruise. It was a time to hear about the country and its history.

Then we met in our individual four groups (20 in ours) to go over some of the various side trips we might want to take once in the various ports. I had planned to do all of them prior to the trip, but after hearing our program director go in more details about each of them, I decided against two of them, which will give me a little extra time on my own.

After that there was a Bloody Mary Cocktail Hours (11am!!!), which I did not partake of.

Lunch at noon was very, very good; and not just because there was an ice cream station to scoop your own! They had pumpkin cream soup, sandwiches, something called whole pink grilled entrecôte of beef, which you could carve as much as you wanted, kaldolmar (which is a traditional Finnish cabbage roll), pesca fresca (which is octopus, sardines, grilled and deep fried calamari, garlic small beef meat patties stuffed with cheese.......pass!), potatoes, carrots, and sautéed spinach, bami goreng (fried egg noodles with vegetables and soy sauce), mustikkapiirakka (Finnish blueberry cake), fresh fruit, and the ice cream.

We arrived in Helsinki around 1:00pm and within a few minutes, we left the ship for an organized (according to the four groups) city tour. Weather was a high of 64 today and a low of 53 last night. We had to move our clocks up one hour.

Helsinki is known as “The Daughter of the Baltic." We visited the Sibelius Monument, a collection of 600 steel pipes arranged into a wave-like sculpture as a tribute to the composer, as well as the Temppeliaukio Kirkko, a church beautifully hewn out of solid granite.

We continued on to Market Square, a perennial outdoor market; Hakaniemi Market Hall, an indoor market with roughly 70 shops split between two floors; and Senate Square, undoubtedly the pride of the city.

Senate Square is ringed by a treasury of Neo-classical buildings, including the 19th-century Lutheran Cathedral, whose central tower dominates the skyline. Helsinki is built over peninsulas, curving around bays, and spilling out across islands that are linked by bridges, causeways, and boats of all descriptions.

It rained most of the time we were there but I was able to get a pretty good photo of the monument and inside the rock church; all other photos were difficult due to the rain.

Here are some Finnish words:
Mol = hello
Mol mol = bye
Kittos = Thank you
Kippis = cheers
Kalsarikannit = to get drunk at home in your underwear!

I am listing some things I found interesting and maybe you will too.

• There is a sport in Finland called wife-carrying. How it works is the men carry their wife a certain distance. Whoever wins gets as much free beer as his wife weighs! So the heavier she is, the more beer he gets!
• Finland holds world championships for mobile phone throwing and mosquito catching! Finland is responsible for the Nokia phones, so I guess that is no problem getting them inexpensively if they break while tossing!
• In Finland, there are days when the sun never sets. Conversely and somewhat terrifyingly, there are days when the sun never comes up....30 days of night, anyone?
• Finland is the only country in the world that broadcasts news in Latin. The jury is still out on why.
• There are 1.8 million saunas in Finland, while the population off Finland is 5.2 million people. They love saunas!
• There is an International Day of Failure in Finland. October 13 is the day when people will be encouraged to throw away the shame associated with failing, whether the failure is personal or professional.
• A 5,000 year-old piece of chewing gum was discovered in Finland.
• Finland is basically a lake. There are 187,888 lakes larger than 5,400 square feet.
• Finns speak very slowly when talking with you in English. They are grammatically correct, but it takes them a long time to say something. Our city tour guide this afternoon made us all very impatient. Every single syllable possible in a word was pronounced as though it was a single word by itself. This is regular for them to talk that way in English. You get so used to slang and cutting the words down to the shortest syllables possible, but you have not really heard English words how they should probably sound until a Finn gets a hold of them!
• The Sami are nomads in Finland; they herd reindeer. There are about 10,000 Sami people here.
• Education is relaxed. The students may sit (or stand) wherever they want. They may call their teachers by the first name. They get 2-1/2 months off school for holidays and return mid-August.
• Finn employees get anywhere from 4-7 weeks of holidays, and Finland basically closes up in July as the employees want to enjoy their time off when the sun is most likely to shine.
• Finns average 85 liters of beer per person; I assume that is in a year.
• Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language. It has 32 letters and 16 cases. It has NO genders, prepositions, or future tenses.
• Angry Birds was invented in Finland and there will soon be an Angry Birds theme park.
• Every year thousands of visitors fly to Rovaniemi in northern Finland to visit Santa at Santa's village.
• There is an igloo hotel in North Finland where all guests sleep in separate igloos. The igloos are see-through so that the guests can see the northern lights, should they appear.
• Helsinki has its own dialect of Finnish called Helsinki Slang. The dialect borrows heavily from Russian, Swedish, and English words, and is spoken by nearly every Helsinki native.
• If Helsinki looks familiar, it is because in the mid-19th century, Finland was a possession of Russia. The center of Helsinki was deliberately reconstructed in a neoclassical style to look more like St. Petersburg.
• Finland's religion is mostly Lutheran, with some Greek Orthodox. I found it extremely interesting that 1% of the taxes collected by the government goes to the churches. That is how they pay for such things as maintenance and running the local churches.
• Finland pays the highest amount of taxes in the European Union, which averages 33%.
• There are no school fees; medical care is covered for everyone, including operations.
• Favorite sort of the Finns is ice hockey.
• Nokia is the biggest tax payer.
• The size of Finland is 0.8% larger than California.
• Wages average $2,900 per month, before taxes. Unemployment rate is at 8.7%.
• There are no pay phones in Finland.
• Finland uses the Euro.

This is the shortest port call we have. At 5:00pm we started navigating out of Helsinki, heading towards Russia, with an anticipated arrival of 8:30 in the morning on Tuesday, July 18. We will spend two days in Russia. I suppose we will have to move our clocks up another hour or two when we arrive there.

It is always fun to watch as the ship leaves a port, churning up the water for the seagulls to dive into it for some food. I enjoy watching what the crew has to do to untie/tie the ropes, and especially like to see the pilot boat escort us out to sea. They get so very close to the ship that we all hold our breath that they don't run into us and get hurt in the process.

 

Sibelius Monument

Rock Church, cut out of solid granite

Sight as we leave Helsinki

Cool looking ship next to us

[itsmagic]

I was curious - do the Finnish put anything on their blueberry pancakes (i.e. maple syrup or blueberry syrup)?  Love your reports!

[World Traveler]

@itsmagic  When I had it this morning, there were different jams, jellies, etc., around that area, but there were also beads, toast, muffins; so I am not sure if they would normally eat it with any of that on top.

I had it all by itself and it was yummy! It looked like there had been some powdered sugar sprinkled on top....something white that was being absorbed into the pancake by the time I got to it. And the pancakes had quite a bit of the  blueberries in it, not just a couple mixed in.

Going to try it? 

[lulu2]

@World Traveler

Isn't the Rock church amazing?  While traveling from the city to the church, our tour guide played Jean Sibelius' Finlandia.

I remember traveling by local boat to small islands where locals frequently spend their summer weekends.

Enjoy your travels and that wonderful room.  Thankfully we were on board for just 1 night.  I remember the shower flooded the entire cabin floor.