I'm in love with Finland

I had purposely booked an early train to Helsinki for two reasons. First, because it meant I would arrive early in Helsinki and, especially when subtracting two time zones, the four hour train ride meant I would have all day to explore in the city. And second, because it was much, much cheaper than the later trains.
I set my alarm for 4:45 in the morning for a 6:50 departure. And I set an alarm at 5:00 and 5:15 and 5:30...just in case. I knew the metro opened up at 6:00 and I would probably have just enough time to take the metro about 30 minutes to the train station, find my train (there are a special set of platforms for international trains) and settle in. The night before I had gone to the receptionist, the same one who checked me in actually, a really, really nice girl whose English is spot on, and asked her if she could print my electronic ticket. She did but it came out a little had to read. She apologized and I said it was fine. I told her what time I was supposed to leave and if there was anything special I had to do to check out. She said I could just leave the key. Then I went to bed.

The next thing I remember it’s 6:00 and the same girl who I talked to the night before is gently touching my shoulder, whispering, “Stephen, it’s 6 o’clock, it’s time to go.” I woke up, rubbed my eyes, and just looked at her and said, “What?” She said, “It’s 6 o’clock. You have a train.” And then I remembered. I snapped out of bed, thanking the girl. I threw on my clothes, packed my back (all in the dark by the way - there were five other guys in the room) and ran to the reception desk. It was 6:12. The girl just looked at me smiling. She took my key, gave me my 100 ruble deposit back, and then gave me a new printed copy of my e-ticket, printed out perfectly, legibly. I didn’t have time to properly show my gratitude to her so I left in a huff but I really do owe her a proper thanks. She really saved me a lot of money and a lot of heartache. Apparently when I put my phone next my ear like I usually do, it somehow managed to find its way under my pillow, muffling all alarm sounds. So I got lucky. I am going to try and write her an email today, although I lost her email in the process. I hope I can figure out a way.

I got to the train station around 6:35. It took me a little while to find the international entrance but I did, and I hopped the train with about 5 minutes to spare. Lucky, lucky me. This train is a special high speed train called “Allegro” that shuttles people across the border from St. Petersburg to Helsinki in under four hours which includes customs and immigration control. This same process that took 8 hours just for immigration on the Mongolian border, stopped at the border, was all handled professionally and while we were moving. We didn’t wait to find the border to start paperwork, the immigration officers boarded the train with us. So as soon as we got underway, they looked at our passports and stamped me out. I have no idea when we rolled across the border, we never stopped. We did stop briefly a couple of hours into the ride, but just for a moment, and the Finnish officers did exactly the same. I had a female officer, with a smiling, happy face and bright red, dyed hair, in a dark green uniform with a gun, come up to me and said, “Welcome to Finland. Passport please.” Then she looked at it and asked me how long I planned to stay in Finland. I said about two weeks and she looked pleased at this. Then she handed me back my passport and said, “Thank you. Enjoy your journey.” smiling the whole time. She did the exact courteous procedure but in perfect Russian to the woman sitting across from me. This put me in a good mood.

We arrived into Helsinki’s main rail station at 8:38 local time, +2 GMT, it was warmer, maybe -2 degrees Celsius, and I walked and wandered my way through downtown Helsinki to find my hostel. Helsinki is a really small city. I read that Finland is one of the least dense countries in the EU by population and the capital, where most Fins live, only has around 600,000 people. So the downtown area, although a maze of pretty cobblestone streets, was easy to navigate and after a 10 minute walk, I found my hostel.

A neat, orderly tram station in downtown Helsinki

On the train we had passed through several small Scandinavian villages with picture perfect, bright colored, wooden homes with little chimneys warming their kitchens for breakfast. The villages were snow covered, hidden between breaks in the dark green, pine wood forest. And as we got closer and closer to the city, even the apartment block suburbs appeared pleasant. Also intermingled with trees, the apartment buildings were neat, orderly, and aesthetic, neat rows of bicycles out front, and people in bright colored scarves and knit hats and brief cases made their way towards the local station platforms as we zipped by. We pulled into the station, a bustling station, the sign outside the train door reading “Helsinki/Helsingfors”. Every sign in this city is written either in Finnish and Swedish, or Finnish, Swedish, and English, or sometimes four or five languages. This particular sign was in Finnish and Swedish. I’ve come to realize that the Swedish pronunciations for names are used almost as much as the Finnish ones and they are much easier for me to pronounce.

I walked out of the station and onto the street. I’ve never been to a place like this before. People, looking typically Scandinavian, sipping coffees, greeting one another as strangers on the street, letting each other pass, waiting for green lights at the crosswalk. People are just so happy here. I passed through Helsinki’s main thoroughfare and past a department store located across a few ancient looking buildings. The first floor, opening to the street, was the most enticing book store I’ve ever peered into. And the reason I peered into it in the first place is because they had a display by the window that featured the new monthly issue of my all time favorite magazine on the planet, “Monocle.” Monocle is a monthly magazine that does stories in five categories: a briefing on major news from around the world, an expose on culture, choosing a new set of countries to analyze each month, a look at global business, a feature on design (this section’s heavy weights are Scandinavia and Japan), and then a feature story for the last section, on something interesting. I can’t do it justice by explaining it here, but it is hand’s down my favorite. And it’s hard to find. It’s a UK publication. But this bookstore had a large display of the front cover of the new issue in its window with hundreds of copies sitting in neat stacks below the display. I just stuck my face against the window, breathing condensation onto the glass. To be honest, knowing this magazine and based on my first impression of this city, it’s as if a giant copy of the magazine exploded in the wild forests of Finland, and the results were Helsinki and all of its happy people.

Monocle magazine display in front of Stockman's Bookstore

The hostel is one of the nicest I’ve ever been in. It’s located in the heart of downtown in an old gothic looking buildings on the 3rd floor in two separate, beautiful apartments. I checked in with a pleasant, young, plump, Finnish woman who talked to me in pleasant bouncing English (as the wonderful Finnish accent tends to make them do) and she showed me to my room. The place has a huge kitchen and common area that looks like an expensive cafe, with high windows looking out to the street below. In fact, as I’m writing I can see huge snowflakes falling slowly to the street below through the window. And my room is warm and cozy, with high ceilings and only four beds, two sets of bunk beds. I was the first one in and so chose a good bed, took a shower (I was still groggy from my quick dash out of St. Petersburg) and took a nap for a couple of hours.

Waking up, refreshed, I decided to go for a walk, explore my neighborhood, locate the food market, and wander around. First, I walked around my street. Helsinki is well known as the design capital of the world. Design for mostly architecture and furniture. All new buildings in the city have a clever, beautiful design to them (like the buildings you might see in a Monocle magazine) and the old ones are preserved and whose ground floors now make up chic cafes and men’s barbershops (go figure - should have waited) and small design shops. I’ve never walked down a more pleasant street. Then I wandered back towards the train station, to the heart of downtown where Stockman’s is. I wandered through the bookstore, flipping through the latest issue of Monocle, and gazing at the amazing collection of international magazines and newspapers, many  of them English language. Then I walked around the three floors of books. All books were written in Finnish or English, intermixed on the shelves. Other languages had their own sections. I’ve come to realize that every single Fin (and I’ve heard every single Scandinavian) speaks English. So both languages are everywhere. I could ask a little Scandinavian child for directions in English if I wanted to. It’s amazing.

Stockman’s also has other department store types of stuff as well as a huge delicatessen and food market one floor underground. This market is like “Whole Foods” at home but nicer. And it’s their average market. Everything in it is of stellar quality. And the market itself is beautiful and clean and organized, with little wall maps to show you where things are. And each employee has a name tag on their shirt which has their name and the flags of the languages they speak. Each name tag that I saw had at least a little Finnish and British flag on them but most had a Finnish, British, and Swedish flag. The elderly woman who checked me out when I went to pay had eight flags on her name tag. Eight! Finnish, British, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Italian, Spanish, and French - how crazy is that. The delicatessen had ready made meals which are convenient and reasonably priced. I really appreciated that.

Then I walked down to the harbor, a close walk from the downtown area. The harbor is almost completely frozen. The harbor in Helsinki quickly opens up to the Bay of Finland which quickly opens up to the Baltic Sea so Helsinki has major ferry services to Tallinn (a few hours away across the bay in Estonia) and Stockholm and Germany as well as other smaller destinations. The harbor is full of huge ice chunks that swell, ebbing and flowing, with the rolling waves. There was a ferry nearby, a small one, sitting on the docks accepting passengers so I went to investigate. The ferry only cost 2 euros so I bought a ticket and hopped on. It turned out this was the ferry to Sveaborg (the easier, Swedish pronunciation), an island nearby, across the harbor, that is home to 900 residents, an old UNESCO Heritage site fortress from the 18th century (built by the Swedes against the Russians - now I’ve seen both sides!), and Finland’s Naval Academy. The ferry got underway and plowed through the ice, crushing it and cracking it loudly as we crunched our way across the harbor. The sky was huge, opening up to the sea and beyond and consisted of a mixture of dark, black clouds that spat snow, pockets of blue sky and the sun, shooting out rays of light through the clouds every once in a while. The dark colors reflected beautifully against the sea and ice. I again felt like I was caught in the middle of a Sigur Ros music video. After about twenty minutes, we pulled into the harbor of Sveaborg and I walked around. The island has a walking path that takes you through the bigger sites of the island. You can walk the length of it slowly in one hour. It takes you past the main buildings of the Naval Academy, the fort and some other quaint homes where hardy residents live. The very southern point of the island, the end of the trail, takes you to the crumbling walls of the old fort, where some cannons point out to sea, and you can climb and clamber around the walls, now covered in snow and ice. But the walls rise high above the sea offering incredible views of the Gulf of Finland. Huge, cracked ice chunks rolled around with the waves and the sea with ice reflecting dark black with the clouds and then golden browns and oranges when the sun appeared. It was magical. I just sat and stared into this scene, mesmerized by its beauty.

My ferry to Sveaborg

The harbor in Helsinki from the ferry

Eventually I made my way back. I was completely frozen through. I took the ferry back, got some food at the deli, and relaxed at the hostel. I went to write and reflect in the beautiful kitchen peacefully amongst other travelers all thinking or cooking or chatting quietly or reading. It was a very relaxing end to my day.

The ferry had to plow through the icy harbor

A view from the southern point of Sveaborg into the Bay of Finland

King's Point on Sveaborg

Reflection of the sky in the icy waters off King's Point

Then I retired to bed. I had been joined by two other guys in my room. The first, a Brazilian from western Brazil, Bruno, who had gone to Hannover for an IT conference and then took a week off afterwards to travel Scandinavia. And the other an American, Eric, a former Air Force guy from Austin, Texas, who is starting a multi-year trip around the world. He’s hoping to write a book for inner-city kids to show them that they can travel the world too and he’s going to show them how, on a budget. It’s a cool idea and I wish him the best.

I’ve woken up late this morning, showered and made breakfast of fresh bread and cheese and blueberry yoghurt and am writing this now staring out the window. I’m in no rush. I want to enjoy this place.