Sylvia's Journal

On Friday we left early after having left the house as spic&span as when we found it. We drove the 200 km back to Helsinki airport and left the car, as agreed upon, at a Park&Fly parking lot. A shuttle dropped us off at the railway station next to the airport so we could take the commuter train into the city. 

The railway station was just as inscrutable as the language. There was an elevator and an escalator that took us into a deep underground cave with very few signs on where to go next. Our phone GPS was not working well that deep underground, so we followed a pathway that did indeed take us to a platform. A train to Helsinki pulled up just as we arrived. We had no time to figure out the ticketing arrangement and hopped on the train hoping we could play the dumb tourist and pay a conductor. He (or she) never showed up and we had an unintentional free ride. As if to punish us for that transgression, Axel left his phone on his seat, which we only discovered 15 minutes after we alighted from the train. Panic!

We were already standing in line at the lost-and-found department, with very little hope of ever finding the phone, when we decided to call his phone in a last effort to find it. Lo and behold someone answered and responded to me in perfect English, a wonder all by itself. It was the cleaning lady who had found it and told me to come back to platform 1 and not to hurry. I put a 5-euro bill in her hand which she refused, but I insisted anyways and thanked her for being so honest. An iPhone is a tempting find. We were lucky she found it and not someone else who wanted an iPhone, even an old model.

A Nigerian taxi driver delivered us to a hotel that was only 15 minutes away by foot but he made it appear to be a long distance and charged accordingly. At first, we trusted him and then we didn’t when he offered to take us to the airport the next morning for nearly twice the advertised charge.

Helsinki was, in some ways, a disappointment. The weather was so-so, including some rain, the city was full of tourists, masses of people surrounding us, something we are not used to. For our first dinner we took a ferry to a restaurant on an island with fortifications and barracks to fend off attacks from the Russians or Swedes or both. On our way back I had another licorice ice cream knowing that my opportunities for such a treat were soon to disappear.

We visited some of the sites recommended by my Finnish colleague, including the wonderful Design Museum which showed the many iconic Finnish designs that are so familiar such as the three-legged Alvar Aalto bent-wood stool that you can buy as an original (250 USD) or as a China-made copy (12 USD), the orange Fiskars scissors, Marimekko, Iitala glass and Arabia ceramics.  We visited the underground Rock Church and ended with a last meal that included salmon and shrimp.

The next morning, we tested ourselves to make sure we went home COVID free.  As we left the hotel at 4:30AM to catch our 7 AM flight to Amsterdam we practically tripped over some very drunk people on the sidewalk who had not known how to stop partying. It was a sad last image we held of Finland.