We welcome you to Finland!

We took a 2-hour ferry from Tallinn over to Helsinki. It’s a massive cruise-style ship with a casino, lots of shopping, even a Burger King. This seal wanders around, making the whole thing feel quite merry. The ship is quite a contrast to our Washington state ferries – this boat we took holds 2800 people:

Here’s Helsinki: (not my pic)

It’s kind of cold here, which is my fault. I booked us in here in mid-October. Look at this place in winter – the whole city freezes over:

Those two pics weren’t mine but this one is – it’s the ice breakers in the Helsinki harbor – used when the Baltic Sea freezes over:

I had two main things I wanted to see in Helsinki. The first one is the Oodi library, from 2018:

You can definitely check out books there but you can also play chess in the entry hall:

You can think about trusting Ron to use the self-service vinyl cutting machine you can “check out”:

For an outrageous surcharge of 70 cents, you can use the 3-D printer:

There’s an entire music studio – just show your library card (all library pics below not mine):

You can make a choice from this wall of guitars:

And just in case you’re interested in an actual book – they are moved around the library by this little robot, Veera:

Here’s one more shot of the exterior:

I also planned on seeing Church on the Rock. It wasn’t on our OAT tour but our amazing OAT guide, Aida, found us a free evening concert – a seriously unusual duo consisting of a marimba and a saxophone.

She shepherded us over using the Helsinki trams – far better than my original plan to walk, given the weather (46 degrees, 20 mile an hour wind gusts, and rain). (Note to you – but too late to help me – did you know that Helsinki is basically as far north as Anchorage? Try to book your trip in July:)

But the church is beautiful. It was quarried right into the bedrock in 1969 and then they popped a copper dome onto the top. The design was the result of an architecture competition requiring that entrants keep/incorporate as much of the existing rock as possible.

Here’s the exterior:

The inside is even better:

We got to sit there for way longer than Ron would normally allow because of the concert. I had an hour in there to marvel at that building. During the course of the concert, I noticed that the building is so roughly hewn that small waterfalls appear in various places and, during lulls in the music, I could hear the dripping of many tiny rivers.

Back to architecture! Here’s Helsinki Central Station, from 1919, flying the Ukrainian flag:

This is Helsinki’s Lutheran cathedral, from about 1850:

This one is the Uspenski Cathedral, a Russian-style orthodox cathedral from 1865:

Here’s a nice view of the square outside Oodi library. It’s a very green city:

We’re wrapping up our tour with OAT. Touring the Baltics has been a huge political lesson for me. And it’s been strange to be here – to see all the pro-Ukrainian flags and displays, to hear the strongly anti-Russian sentiment – and to feel like I’m getting a sense of grasping the complicated interweaving of world events – only to have things in Israel and Palestine explode into yet another horrifying situation that reminds me that I can’t make sense of much of anything.

We’ve got one more day and then Ron and I are heading back to the warm(ish) environs of London, where we’ll be on our own to get lost, bicker about who got us lost, and argue about the GPS. Maybe he’ll be more deferential to me when he sees that I posted this for all of you to enjoy: