I made my way from Stockholm to Finland by overnight ferry. Although it's not quick, it's a very popular mode of transport between the two countries. For starters it's cheap - especially if like me you don't book a cabin. It's still comfortable enough without a cabin as some airplane-style seating is available, but with much more space to spread out and recline than on a plane. And then of course you can wander freely, take in the view on deck (including the stunning Stockholm archipelago - if I ever win the Lottery, my first purchase would be one of the many thousands of summer holiday homes on islands in the archipelago), have proper meals in the restaurant or canteen, use your laptop with free wi-fi and charging points, and so on. I'm never going to be the biggest fan of air travel, so I rather relished this in comparison. The ferries are apparently also famous for raucous debauchery, although to be honest I saw minimal evidence of that (probably the relatively short crossing to Turku on a Monday night isn't peak party time). The other reason for the popularity of the ferries is that duty-free shopping is available. If that sounds strange, it's because they always make an intermediate stop in the Åland Islands, which are part of Finland but largely autonomous and granted concessions in their EU membership terms - including the continuation of duty free. One way and another, I'd recommend the ferry to anyone wanting to do a trip taking in both Sweden and Finland.
Turku isn't exactly a name that's likely to roll off the tongues of most Brits as a familiar tourism destination (or familiar place full stop, come to that) - but that's quite a shame really because it's genuinely lovely. I think pretty much anyone who came here in summer would agree. and I don't think this is just my bias towards Scandinavia talking. The population is only a couple of hundred thousand - Finland is an expansive land containing only 5 million people after all - and Turku is the... well, it's more polite not to apply the label of either "second city" or "third city" because Turku is forever locked in a ferocious rivalry with the city of Tampere, to which it's a very similar size. I went to Tampere last summer and while it was nice, I definitely prefer Turku. Anyway, while you wouldn't exactly imagine you're in a mega-metropolis and you don't seem to have to walk very far to find a deserted street, on summer evenings at least there's quite a buzz to be found along the highly picturesque river in the city centre. As well as nice riverside restaurants, there are a number of large moored boats whose decks function as public bars - some of them with live music and an edgy feel. You also have rather endearing authentic wooden houses dotted around the city. There are some lovely historic buildings in Vanha Suurtori, the old town square, and the nearby Cathedral was consecrated in 1300 (albeit it's been through several rebuildings since). Additionally there's a large open-air museum in the main concentrated area of wooden housing that has survived fires down the ages, where you can watch various traditional industries operating, such as sewing, barrel-making, pottery, printing presses and so on - described by Lonely Planet as Finland's best museum. And there's a huge castle dating from the 13th Century, one of the most charming I've come across and, like Turku in general seemingly, less than flooded with other tourists (quite refreshing and novel after some of the earlier stops on my travels!). I also managed an easy and very pleasant day trip to the smallish town of Rauma, Finland's largest preserved wooden town and a World Heritage Site.
Turku Castle
I was going to be couchsurfing for the whole of my week in Finland, but without actually needing to log back into the Couchsurfing website at all. My lovely host in Helsinki on my previous visit last year, Jenny, had very kindly not only offered to host me again, but had also put me in direct contact with her friend in Turku, Annu, who was looking to dip a first toe into the whole couchsurfing thing. When Annu realised after this was arranged that she was actually going to be out of town after my first night, without being asked (which I wouldn't have dreamed of doing) she found one of her local friends Eini to put me up instead for my remaining two nights. By my reckoning that made Eini a friend of a friend of a friend - how's that for degrees of separation? It all worked out beautifully, as so often with Couchsurfing. I also got an invite to a house party for Eini's fellow students (none of them all that much younger than me, because the length of university courses in Finland is much more flexible and it's common to mix part-time studying with part-time paid work), and ended up that night in a student bar drinking shots of an apparently notoriously lethal Finnish concoction that tasted like aniseed cough syrup. The best bit was, the whole smallish group seemed perfectly happy to mostly speak English all night solely for my benefit; when I mentioned how good of them this was, they said, "No no, we are grateful for the opportunity to practise our English"! It's been a tad shaming a number of times on my trip to be a native speaker of the world's global language, getting away with being essentially monoglot when in countries like Finland pretty much everyone speaks English well as a second language. That night I also got some more of the "I love your accent!" that I seem to get more in Finland than anywhere else I've travelled...
The Finnish people are probably a little infamous for having particular difficulty with depression during their long, dark, cold winters - but on the flipside it sounds like they go a bit crazy during their lovely daylight-saturated summers. I was told that they are pretty much always outdoors on summer evenings - drinking outside in bars (although Finns have the reputation of drinking a lot in winter as a way of coping, apparently they drink even more in summer), going to open-air theatres that seem to be commonplace, or just enjoying the copious parkland that's to be found in Turku in particular. I was absolutely astounded, when Annu took me for an evening walk incorporating a couple of said parks, to see a small group of young casually dressed Finns drinking beer from cans while playing... croquet! Apparently croquet is a popular Finnish summertime park pursuit, usually a very casual one. It was news to me that croquet is played anywhere outside the British Commonwealth, let alone in a casual way by young people.
In one of the parks, Annu and I thought we saw a few brown leaves on one of the trees - while autumn certainly arruives earlier in Scandinavia than further south, in the first week of August this was surprising to us both. When I mentioned this to Anna when we met the next day, she froze and stared at me with a real horror in her eyes, saying, "No don't say that, autumn can't be coming already!!" And I thought I dislike the end of summer in the UK...
In Turku and in Helsinki, all street names and many other signs are in both Finnish and Swedish. Finland is officially a bilingual country, and there is a substantial Swedish-speaking population across much of the west of the country and in Helsinki, with their own schools, cultural centres, cinemas and so on. The status of Swedish is often contentious among the Finnish-speaking majority; they are forced to learn Swedish at school, but many resent being made to spend this time they perceive they could be devoting to a "more useful" language instead. Seemingly may Finns are not keen to use the Swedish they have learnt (although in customer service jobs in places like Turku they're expected to be prepared to), and one of my Swedish friends in Stockholm who's visited Helsinki a number of times told me that he considers it more "polite" to speak English there. The difficulty is probably connected with the fact that it's because Sweden was the former colonial power in Finland (before Russia that is) that Swedish ever took root there. However opinions amongst Finnish-speaking Finns do seem to vary, as a debate on the subject of whether they should learn Swedish broke out at the house party I attended, with one guy arguing strongly that they should.
Helsinki was every bit as lovely on this, my second visit, as on my first a year earlier. I would grudgingly accept that it's a city you'll either take to or you won't - staying in a hostel for part of my stay last year, I met two Turkish backpackers who complained of being bored and labelled Helsinki a "half-day city", and if you don't like it then that's not necessarily completely unfair, since essential 'sights' are relatively few. I would say that everyone should see Temppeliaukio Church, a 1960s construction hewn into solid rock, remarkably stylishly and tastefully, with striking natural light and 22km of copper tubing covering the ceiling. And Suomenlinna, a short ferry hop from the city, is an 18th century fortess island fantastic for exploring both military and civilian installations, and taking in the views - its attractions recognised with World Heritage Site
status.
But while overall the city is not quite as dramatic as Stockholm, and considerably smaller too, I've found that it's a city that's exceptionally good to just potter around - especially anywhere near the highly impressive landmark of Senate Square, Esplanad Park, the grand and very characterful railway station and the large square outside, around the open-air Kauppatori (fish market) where you can buy a reindeer burger for lunch, the island of Katajanokka with its imposing, towering cathedral, and the waterline all around the port area including probably my favourite park anywhere, the stunning Kaivopuisto Park. Actually that's quite a lot, I now realise as I write this. Add to that that in summer people are sitting outside eating and/or drinking everywhere, creating a great buzz. Overall the city is compact, stylish, likeable and very welcoming.
A gay mecca it isn't, but it has one very decent full-time gay club, apparently the largest in Scandinavia, which I liked a lot even before I got to go there on their monthly Eurovision night upstairs. Enough said!
status.
But while overall the city is not quite as dramatic as Stockholm, and considerably smaller too, I've found that it's a city that's exceptionally good to just potter around - especially anywhere near the highly impressive landmark of Senate Square, Esplanad Park, the grand and very characterful railway station and the large square outside, around the open-air Kauppatori (fish market) where you can buy a reindeer burger for lunch, the island of Katajanokka with its imposing, towering cathedral, and the waterline all around the port area including probably my favourite park anywhere, the stunning Kaivopuisto Park. Actually that's quite a lot, I now realise as I write this. Add to that that in summer people are sitting outside eating and/or drinking everywhere, creating a great buzz. Overall the city is compact, stylish, likeable and very welcoming.
A gay mecca it isn't, but it has one very decent full-time gay club, apparently the largest in Scandinavia, which I liked a lot even before I got to go there on their monthly Eurovision night upstairs. Enough said!
Thanks to Jenny's willingness to act as tour guide, I spent a lot of my time this time by waterfronts well outside the city centre, including one of the main city beaches. While I'm no expert on waterfront scenery of the world - having seen disgracefully little of the coastline of my own country - there is something really bewitching about a number of the waterside views I've seen in Scandinavia. I hope this comes across in my Facebook photos but actually I'm not too sure that it will. There's just a calm, exceptionally pure beauty that exerts a hugely strong emotional pull on me. The beach was busy on this warm sunny Sunday, so it's not just me; the scene was only spoilt slightly by a real haziness and thickness in the air - this was the weekend of the rampant forest fires in western Russia, which were clearly having an impact even this substantial distance away.
At the coast in Helsinki
After the lovely Sunday afternoon at the beach, also shared with Jenny's friend Jani, Jani had invited us both back to his apartment block for a shared sauna. Saunas are an essential part of life for practically all Finns - they will take a sauna with family and/or friends typically at least weekly, often more. They're always taken completely naked. There are public saunas - although very few of them since virtually everyone has good access to a private sauna in their home or apartment block - and these are gender segregated (I went to one in Tampere last year, certainly a memorable experience). However when at a private sauna with family or friends, mixing of genders is the norm. Undressing, sitting in the sauna naked and showering together with a female friend was certainly an entirely new experience for this Brit - but then really, what should the problem be? The relaxed attitude of Scandinavia towards nudity is surely yet another attribute to be commended. And just in case you were wondering, Finnish saunas are always completely non-sexual environments.
And then the next day it was all over. Time to fly home to London from the typically pleasant and efficient Helsinki Airport, and end my five-month journey and adventure. With very mixed feelings about leaving Scandinavia and generally about coming to the end of my travelling. But rather than try to be philosophical here I'll expand in one further blog post.
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