, Finland Jounal & Photos - Helsinki, Finland - Holland America Westerdam Baltic Cruise - August 4, 2005
Helsinki, Finland - Holland America Westerdam - August 4, 2005
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Esplanade Park (18 Pictures) Helsinki Market Square (14 Pictures) Helsinki Miscellaneous (17 Pictures) Helsinki Cathedral (25 Pictures) Uspenski Cathedral (18 Pictures) Helsinki Olympic Stadium (18 Pictures)This was a light day for touring. After blowing off our wake up call we started to get ready for the day at 8:00 AM. We went up to the Lido Dining Room and had breakfast. I’m getting quite fond of a salmon, shrimp and cheese omelet. We went down to disembark the ship and found we were quite a ways away from the town. They had a bus taking everyone from the ship to town for $3.00 each way.
Well this I just finished typing this day up and touched something that completely erased the rest of this day’s journal. I’m really pissed off right now. I had less than a paragraph to finish. So here I go again.
The drive to town took us to the western end of the Esplanade, which ran down the street seven blocks to the Market Center. Market Center is an area that has a market going on along as being at the port where ferries and tour boats depart.
We started walking to the Market Center but we both needed cash. We checked a couple of exchange booths that had 5% fees for American Express Traveler’s Checks. We found a bank off the Esplanade and probably would have been better off at the exchange booth. Matt gave me a hard time for quite a while about that. The bank ended up across the street from one of the main sites in Helsinki. The Cathedral of Helsinki was right across the street atop a hill of about 40 stairs. At the foot of the hill was a huge square that had a statue of Russian Czar Alexander II. It was a decent sized church and was white with green domes. The inside was fairly plain but really everything is going to pale in comparison to what we saw in St. Petersburg.
When we entered the cathedral there was a dance troupe of girls about Erin’s age dancing ballet or some local dance. Matt was hard on them and had made another snap judgment about who was the best dancer. I exited a different door than Matt and ran into a couple from Silver Spring who was on the Celebrity Constellation. I was wearing a University of Maryland t-shirt, which is a magnet for attracting people from home. I also ran into our dinner tablemates John and Jill. She was doing pretty well considering she had been on crutches for six weeks. She was supposed to discard her remaining crutch on Monday but was using it around Helsinki. I can understand why since I hated walking on all the cobblestone streets in these European cities.
I found Matt who had made a lap around the cathedral and pointed out he was the first of us to do so. I don’t know why this was so important to him but it was. We descended the stairs and watched a mime type group of three girls in witch’s masks. I hate mimes and their air guitar routine didn’t warrant a payment.
We made our way to the market a couple of blocks away. The market has three areas. There was a fresh fruit, vegetables and fish area; the souvenir area; and the cooked food area. The fresh fruit and vegetables looked amazing. Everything looked better than anything I’ve seen back home.
The cooked food area consisted of a lot of local foods like grilled salmon, salmon paella and white fish. The white fish was bait fish that had it head cut off and was deep-fried. The stands all had these huge skillets with mounds of the paella.
We got an Olvi Beer at a stand that also gave us a sampling of the white fish. It was really very good. It resembled a sardine but it didn’t have that salty taste. After our beer we wandered around and bought some souvenirs then headed up to the other cathedral in this area, The Uspenski Cathedral. This was on a hill overlooking the Market Center. We hadn’t seen many hills this trip. This was a red brick cathedral with green spires. Again it was a nice little cathedral but it couldn’t stand up to what we’ve seen in St. Petersburg. The funniest thing we saw at the cathedral was a sign of a schnauzer with a red cross through it. We couldn’t figure out why the Finnish people were discriminating against the Schnauzer but we were sure it had something to do with a WWII grudge against Germany.
We headed back towards the Market Center and Matt had seen an area near the water that had a life saving ring and ladder. He figured it was for drunks who fell in the water. We wandered around the Esplenade/Market Center area for a while and got a couple of more beers at our stand. Matt found out the girl working the stand with the nose and tongue ring had lived in Washington, DC. This was probably why she spoke better English than us.
It was getting to be about 1:30 PM and we decided we should go see one more sight. We had to use the bathroom and that ended up costing us .40 Euro each. We saw our Tennessee friends Tom Newsom and Don Moser with their wives who were headed towards the Market Center. We gave them a quick rundown of the area. They had been on a tour and apparently had seen a house that had doors I could not fit into. That gave them a good laugh. I guess they will judge everything by my size from now on.
We boarded the tram to the 1952 Olympic Stadium near the Cathedral of Helsinki. I miscounted the stops and we got off a couple too early. As we were looking at our map a crazy old lady came to try and help us. She just got so flustered trying to explain what we had to do even though we already new. We needed to go up two more stops. She asked us about tickets and we didn’t really have an answer so she thought we had either magically appeared at the tram stop or had walked. She told us we needed to buy a one hour tram ticket at a store but got flustered again when trying to decide which one of two that were across the street from each other to go to.
We had planned to just jump back on but as we stopped she yelled at us that we had to go to the store to buy our ticket. We just did after that. It turned out to be a good move because we met this pretty cool girl behind the counter of the store. We asked her about tickets and she sold us each one. When we asked about fines for not having one she said it was 60 Euro but she hadn’t seen a tram cop enforcing that in two years. Matt was getting parched, I had bought a 1.5-liter coke, and asked, “I can’t take a beer on the tram, can I?â€