Fun in Finland: Part 2!

Map of the Fortress/Islands

Ariel photo of Suomenlinna in the summer

I had to include this picture because big old canons are manly, and after living with 5 girls for 3 months I need to surround myself with manly things

Leah and I on one of the banks
Cute Finnish children getting candy

Helsinki Cathedral

How might one go about ordering one of these? Crazy Finnish language!

Inside of the rock church

After waking up in our oh so comfy bed, Leah and I eventually forced ourselves to go downstairs to the massive breakfast buffet. After eating our fill and sampling almost all of the items available (and making sure to eat every piece of fresh fruit we could get our hands on [as they are very expensive in Russia]) we went back up to our room and got ready for our first full day in the Finnish capital. A little about Helsinki; it's situated on the southern coast of Finland and has around 580,000 people in the city itself, the metro area is just over 1 million. They speak Finnish which is closely related to Estonian, distantly related to Hungarian and isn't even an indo-european language like say Danish, German, English, French, or Russian (see picture of hamburger). When the Swedes controlled Finland the capital of used to be a city on the west coast called Turku, but when the Russians gained control of the country they decided to move the capital to an area closer to Russia and farther from Sweden, and so Helsinki became the capital. With that said, our first sight for the day was the island of Suomenlinna, which is an old military naval fortress on an island just south east of Helsinki. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Sight and we had to take a cute little ferry from the harbour to get to it. The fortress was built when Sweden controlled Finland and when Sweden had a military alliance with France against Russia. Sweden, who feared a simultaneous attack on her by the Danish (who also owned Norway) and Russia, decided to built a massive military fortification to protect against Russian expansionism. The French, who also feared Russian expansionism offered to pay a substantial amount of the cost of the fortress. This all occured around 1748. The Russians eventually came anyway, and despite having superior forces and equipment, the Swedish Commander surrendered the fortress and Finland became a grand duchy of the Russian empire. The fortress' guns were then turned westward, and during the Crimean War (1853-56) a massive flotilla of British and French ships turned up at Suomenlinna and began a brutal bombardment of the fortress for 47 hours, the Russian forces were ill-equipped, but the combined fleet did not send any reinforcments ashore, and instead set sail for a fortress closer to St. Petersburg. With that history and the fact that it is still standing in very good condition is no reason why it is Helsinki's top tourist attraction. So Leah and I borded the ferry and had fun listening to the multitude of languages spoken on the ferry, Russian, American English, British English, Finnish, Swedish and more, as well as seeing the ferry cruising through some of the ice chunks that still remained in the gulf. Once we got to the island we took a walk towards the information centre, where we bought ourselves a map and went into the museum so we could understand what we were actually going to be seeing (neither of us knew anything about the history of the place.) We also watched an interesting 30 minute video explaining the history of the island and its significance. After that we decided to explore the islands on foot. We walked around the main tourist route and had a few side adventures into some of the dark corridors in the fortifications (nothing is off limits you just need a light) as well as seeing the tomb of the main architect of the fort. It was very interesting and a side note to the fort itself is that people still live on the islands, it is not solely an old military fort. So, while we were poking around the fort we kept seeing these young kids dressed up (sort of like Halloween but not in scary costumes) with decorated willow branches, and they go to people's houses and get candy, even I will admit that they were pretty cute. We decided to head back to the mainland after getting tired of walking and finishing the main route through the fort and so boarded the ferry again. Once back on the mainland we ate lunch at a very nice cafe where we enjoyed a massive salad containing all the things that we miss eating a lot of in Russia; fresh spinach, lettuce, carrots, artichoke heats, peppers, tomatoes, olives and more. We then went to the Helsinki Cathedral or Helsingin tuomiokirkko in Finnish. The Helsinki cathedral was built in 1830-1852 and was very big, minimalist and a very nice change from the very elaborate and gilded Russian Orthadox churches that we've been seeing so much of lately. It was also very peaceful inside, and unlike the churches in Russia, they don't charge an admission fee for people to come in and see. After seeing the main Helsinki cathedral we walked to another, very interesting church called Temppeliaukion kirkko, which was carved into the surrounding rock. It is quite hard to describe, the best way is to see a picture, but it was also a very interesting sight. Following our day of sightseeing we went back to the hotel for a bit of a break and then out to dinner for delicious Thai food which rivaled anything that we've had in restaurants in Victoria. Following this we made our way back to that oh so comfy hotel room.

*Note the picture of Suomenlinna is not ours, but it gives a better view of the fortress
* Same as the rock church and the Helsinki Cathedral