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Red Umbrella tour group at Senate Square, Helsinki
I love Helsinki Airport. Straightforward, practical, efficient, elegant. I walked with Megan to immigration and drew her aside into a central hub where there were padded lounges for sitting, resting, or sleeping. In a continuous screen above, surrounding the space, images and sounds of Finnish forest and lake scenery played. Birds flew across the scene, bugs crawled on the tree trunks, the leaves moved in the wind.
Hard to think of a modern airline terminal where good prime commercial space is given over to the people.
Once we had our passports stamped and our bags collected, we dived in and put on some heavier outerwear. I had my warm jacket strategically placed on top of everything else, hat and gloves nearby.
The plan was to take the train into Helsinki Central Station, leave our bags in a locker there, and take a Red Umbrella tour around the central city. A free tour but of course one tips the guide.
The train station is about a hundred metres below the terminal level and there is a truly epic bank of escalators to descend to platform level. You can take the lift if you want — or have a lot of baggage — but we went down through that immense space.
Megan regards the void — image by author
I sidetracked a bit and we took a good look at the space from a walkway off to one side. Here is where you can see both banks of escalators at once, because there is another set almost as high off to the left. Kind of vertiginous, really.
There is also a regular shopping mall landside. Food court, supermarket, pharmac_ etc. where the prices aren’t jacked up and the wares aren’t luxury goods. Nice touch, that.
Trains to Helsinki are about 4 Euro a ticket, pay with card. Very handy if you arrive without local currency. Plenty of room on the frequent trains for bags and it takes about half an hour into the city.
Finland, it must be said, has an excellent railway system. We could have bought tickets straight to Tampere (with one change at a suburban station) and the trains between Helsinki and Tampere go every fifteen minutes or so.
Megan wanted more of a look at Helsinki and to be honest, so did I. Otherwise we’d arrive in Tampere midmorning, long before check-in and have to bum around the town feeling tired and listless.
Instead we found the luggage lockers at Helsinki Station, put on gloves and beanies, and spent the time before our tour began by taking a walk down to the waterfront and back, finishing off with a leisurely coffee in a thankfully warm cafe.
I spent most of a twenty-three-hour layover here last year, so I was able to be a bit of a guide, retracing the steps I’d taken in my increasingly fruitless search for a good cheap dinner on the longest day of the year.
This time, at least, places were opening up as the spring day brightened rather than closing down while the sun still shone in the sky as had been my experience.
There was coffee to be had and breakfast for those who wanted it.
Our meeting point for the tour was the statue of Tsar Alexander II in Senate Square, in front of Helsinki Cathedral. I posed my travelling companion bear while we waited for a guide with a red umbrella to show up.
Bianca. Red umbrella, blue cap, great English, boundless enthusiasm, and a library of information about Helsinki.
She was expecting eight booked tourists but only four and a half showed. All Aussies, including a couple from Dubbo on their honeymoon.
We got to know one another while waiting for the no-shows. Bianca is a student from the other side of the Gulf of Finland, supplementing her income and practising her English by running tours. The two from Dubbo had been together ten years, had a child under biological clock pressure, and decided they might as well get married. Their three-year-old daughter was astonishingly well-behaved and spent a lot of the tour asleep under warm blankets.
I regarded her with some envy.
It wasn’t what one might call freezing but it was certainly on the cold side of cool. Gloves, warm hat, scarf; about all you could see was a nose pointing in the direction of the various landmarks Bianca indicated.
I must say that Senate Square is a splendid piece of civic architecture. Parliament and University face each other on either side, and the cathedral is raised above, up an impressive flight of wide stone steps that must be perfect for onlookers to regard fairs, celebrations, protests and gatherings of all kinds. Such as the proclamation of Finnish independence from Russia in 1917.
History right here.
We went inside the cathedral, a grand Lutheran production, an IKEA in comparison with the Catholic cathedral we looked at later.
Helsinki Cathedral — image by author
I made a vertical pan shot up to the lofty dome. Gosh, this must be a hard place to heat in the depths of winter.
No tourists, members only — image by author
On that note, a sign outside advertised a performance later on that I was certain wouldn’t be visually impressive but most likely an experience to be shared and talked about for years to come.
Across the way we looked into the old municipal library. A grand edifice in the old style, welcoming of visitors.
Megan snaps at books — image by author
There was a dome and multiple balconies, surrounded by books. A coffee shop in the basement, so obviously still in heavy use.
Vertical interior pan — image by author
Oh boy, was this a library and a half. We had a look at the new one a little later on, one equally impressive though in a very different style.