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Last weekend, we went with the boat, to Helsinki, the finish capital! Here is the weekend’s summary…

Helsinki is the Finish capital and has 584 000 inhabitants, the city is surrounded by several islands. For almost 200 years, Finland was an annex of the Russian Empire, and it’s only since 1917 that it got its independence. The buildings are mainly news, the old ones were destroy during fires or wars. The money used there is the Euro, which was easier for me to pay!

 

Agrandir le plan

So we took the bus at Linköping’s central station last Friday at 1pm, and we went aboard of the boat at Stockholm, some hours after.

First impression we got when we arrived aboard was: Wouaw! It looked more like a mall than a boat! The girls booked a room without any window (cheaper of course), but with Pascal, we booked one with a window for a cheap price (~10€).

We spend the evening to make some shopping, visit the boat, eat, watch the spectacle, go drink at the bar and watch the karaoke.

We  arrived the tomorrow morning at 10am and we started to discover the city.

We walked in Helsinki’s streets to go in the covered market, the Lutheran Cathedral (simple and new), the Russian one: Ouspenski (red color, and very complicated architecture) and the Temppeliaukio church, made in rock, with an amazing dome.

 

We visited the different Christmas market through the city and then the big library (3 huge floors of books), and the mall. I think that this kind of building is built to stay in a long time, it’s easy to loose yourself on, and it’s a good way to don’t stay under the snow.

We saw, with Pascal, a French Christmas market, with typical French products, as cheeses, dry sausages and other nice stuff like this.

After looking a while for the Hard-Rock Café, I ask to a Hairy Finish guy. He explain me that unfortunately, there is not in Helsinki and that’s a shame for a country which has a power-metal/hard rock reputation.

Finaly, we went back on the boat, tired and we start the journey to arrive at Linköping at 2pm on Sunday.

Finish language is quite hard to understand, we tried to watch the subtitle on TV programs: impossible to identify the subject, the verb and other parts of a sentence, every words has at least 5 letters :p :

Anteeksi, mutta minä en puhu suomea: To say that you don’t speek finish,
Minä olen täällä ensimmäistä kertaa: To say that it’s the first time you come.

It was really nice!