Thursday – Helsinki, Finland

A week ago, if you’d asked me to point to Finland on a blank map of the world, I would have struggled. If you’d then asked me what the capital of Finland is, I wouldn’t have known; such is the diabolical state of my geographical knowledge (which might account for how badly I did in Geography in my final year at school – which is a shame cos I love all those ox-bow lakes and glacial thingamijigs).

Today, we arrived in the capital city of Finland… Helsinki.

With the outside temperature at balmy minus-5-degrees, we figured it was time to break out the thermal undies… and what an absolute boon they were! We emerged from the relative warmth of the ship, fully-breakfasted, into a white winter wonderland. Roads were white, and snow was falling in light flurries; on the deck, it was landing faster than they could sweep it up.

The ship was conveniently berthed within a 15-20 minute walk to the town centre. We visited our first church of the day before dropping down into the market place, where we were greeted by what can only be described as a giant alien having a pee (if you don’t believe me, check out the photo in Tracey’s blog). It was quite early (about 9am), and traders in the adjacent market were only just starting to construct their stands… we found the Tourist Information Centre, to help formulate a battle plan, then moved on to our second church of the day – a massive cathedral situated on a broad square, known as Senate Square, sporting a large monument which a coachload of Japanese tourists insisted on having individual ‘standing-in-front-of’ photos taken of every person – which is fine, but makes it awkward to take an un-crowded photo of the monument.

The inside of the cathedral was large and airy; nowt there but a huge space with an altar and tall, domed ceilings – certainly nothing like the ornate interiors we’ve become accustomed to, but pleasant enough.

From here, we walked to our third church of the day; Temppeliaukio Church – also known as the Rock Church. It might seem like we visit a lot of churches; I should say that it isn’t because of any religious imperative… churches are integral to the timeline of any city, and part of its historical development. They also provide great photo opportunities. The Rock Church was something a bit different. We hadn’t quite known what to expect; we knew, from the literature, that it was hwen out of rock, and the accoustics are reputedly good. When we got there, we were both quite impressed with what we saw. The Rock Church is indeed hewn out of rock; a huge, circular space where the walls, for the most part, are solid rock-face. In the centre of this space, chairs are arranged, beneath a circular, wooden ceiling. While we were there, there was an organist tinkering with the organ; he seemed to be working through short patches of music, fiddling with the settings and noting them down, presumably for a future performance. There were moments during his tinkering that he launched into long passages, and we were able to hear the acoustics for ourselves… needless to say… the sound was quite awesome!

Our next stop was a park some 15 minutes walk away, to see a monument to Sibelius; Finland’s most famous composer. It was a curiosity, to be sure; tall, stainless steel pipes all stuck together in a seemingly random fashion, created a very modern installation (which took 6 years to construct, apparently)… perfect for Japanese tourists to cluster all over, under and around it, to take endless photographs of each other, making the taking of a people-less photo of it extremely difficult. A coachload of such visitors (I’m not certain, but I think it was the same groups we’d encountered earlier) arrived at the same time as we did… quite frustrating.

On our journey back towards the city centre, we saw the National Opera House, the Olympic stadium and a large multi-auditorium-ed Conference Centre, known simply as The Finlandia Hall. Once back in the city, we were both ready for a sit down, so we chose to have a drink in non other than a Marks and Spencer Coffe Shop (which also, much to my glee, had free wi-fi… yessssss!).

Despite being home to a quarter of the whole population of Finland, only half of its 500 square miles is developed, making it the most sparsely-populated capital in the EU (apparently). It seemed a friendly, clean and well-behaved city to us; so well-behaved that even the crows use the pedestrian crossings to cross the busy roads (this is true: we actually saw, to our amazement and amusement, a hooded crow cross not one, but two zebra crossings on one of the streets, on our way back to the town centre.

All aboard time was 3pm, which left a whole chunk of the afternoon for me to do a little painting in the Craft Room; a view of the Cathedral on the Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg. This evening, the showteam gave us their version of the Queen musical ‘We Will Rock You’ (complete with a very impressive rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’). I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen this show performed on the Marco Polo, with different teams, and never get bored of it.

We were due to be visiting Stokholm, Sweden, via tender, tomorrow (our final port stop of this first cruise), but a storm in the North of the Baltic has resulted in a change of itinerary. Instead, we’ll be visiting a place (the name of which I can’t remember, but everybody keeps referring to it as Chlamydia), in Lithuania.