First pictures of Helsinki

Helsinki. You are here.

I got into Helsinki at 10:00 a.m., so I had time to kill before I likely could have checked into my hotel. So I did the long, slow roll of my wheeled luggage through the cobblestone streets of Helsinki.

This is the view of the marina area. Uspenski Cathedral, the Russian Orthodox Cathedral dating back to when Helsinki and Finland as a whole were under the wretched thumb of the Russian czar, is on the right. You can sort of make out the golden onion dome at the top. On the left, the Wheel in the Sky, I mean SkyWheel.

The cruise vacation is over. Let the real vacation resume.

This is the now-shuttered Old Customs House.

 

Google maps said it is a museum that is "temporarily closed." Given that the "temporary" closures of the COVID pandemic started more than three years, I am thinking that, three-plus years after COVID, anything still listed as "temporarily closed" due to the pandemic is now closed not-to-temporarily. 

This the Helsinki SkyWheel, from across an empty parking lot.

It doesn't look very impressive up close.

But the Russian Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral continues to look impressive even in close-up view.

And this is Senaatintori, Senate Square.

The signature building of the Helsinki skyline. The building that they show when they want to show that they are in Helsinki.

Helsingin tuomiokirkko. The Helsinki Cathedral.

One observation about the Finnish language here. It is a strange, Siberian language, vaguely related to Hungarian and no other European languages except its sibling language, Estonian. But unlike Hungarian, or Swedish, or any other European language with which I am familiar, there appears to be a complete and welcome lack of diacritical marks in spelling Finnish. You know what diacritical marks are, right? They are those accents, umlauts, tildes, cestas, hats and other marks over and under vowels and consonants that make a language almost impossible to spell with an English language keyboard. Finnish might be diacritic free. For those of us with an English language keyboard, we salute you.

Soon I had wheeled my way to my hotel, the Hotel Indigo on Bulevardi. Apparently there is only one "boulevard" in all of Helsinki, so the street is just called "Bulevardi," or "Boulevard."

I eventually decided to eat some supper. But where to go?

Nothing on the Boulevard, so instead I head up Fredrikinkatu instead, which I think translate to, and I am not being precise with this translation, "Frederick-something."

Destination: Bruuveri.

Which I think translates to "brewer." It was a brew pub, with about eight or nine beers on tap (one was a hard cider, so it would be more accurate to say "seven or eight beers on tap"), none of which I recgognized. Always a good sign in a real brew pub.

I told the bartender I liked darker beers, but not so dark as to be stout. He recommended the Malmgård X-Porter, which was black like coffee. But better than a stout. I ordered the Wiener Schnitzel.

I know, not very Finnish of me, but I didn't want something too difficult. Interesting music playing at the Bruuveri. Keep in mind, that there are three things the Finns love: sauna, highly-caffeinated coffee (world's largest per capita consumers of coffee, and by a large margin), and heavy metal music. Bruuvari wasn't playing metal, but they most definitely were not playing contemporary pop. They were playing American hard rock. From my era. (Some of the music I heard is embedded in the words of that previous sentence, if your are interested.)

Welcome to Helsinki.