"finland: where the people are quietly fluent in five different languages." - our walking tour guide ...for more details read below!
On Friday July 22, Nick and I arrived in the country of Finland. I hailing from the great city of Bochum and Nick from Hamburg. The people of Finland are quiet but very smart and friendly. We did not land until extremely late unfortunately so we headed to the hotel and checked in then went to grab some grub and passed out. We knew we'd start bright and early on Saturday.
On Saturday, we headed to the local market next to the harbor and had a quick walk around. We were going to hop on the ferry and head to a nearby island but decided to postpone to Sunday because of the weather. Instead we headed to the meeting point for the walking tour. While we waited we went into the gorgeous
Helsinki Cathedral that is in the middle of the city. Our walking tour guide had a crazy hat on with moose ears on so we found him pretty quickly. You'd think he would have been pretty quirky and outgoing but he had to have a speaker to talk through therefore further showing how naturally quiet Finnish people are :). Our tour group was absolutely humongous though as I assume everyone and their mother comes to Finland only in the summer when it is semi-warm outside! There were a lot of great stops on the tour and we got to go inside this other church called
St. John's Church. It was so gorgeous. The tour guide told us that most Finnish people speak
FOUR languages on average and his high school taught 12 languages. Just insane...#goamericans. Halfway through the tour we took a pit stop and Nick and I found potentially the coolest place in all of Helsinki that is currently being built. It's this awesome sauna/pool facility that is being built directly on the harbor and should be finished soon. You can grab a snack and/or drink and just sit around the water no matter what time of year....next time in Helsinki we will definitely be grabbing our suits and hitting this place up. At the end of the tour we went into this really trippy new age church called
Kamppi Church that is built of all wood from the Finnish woods and is non-denominational. It looks kind of like a large ship. It won the National Design contest a few years back.
After the tour we decided to go to the
National Museum of Finland. Nick was intrigued and I was bored, story of my life. But some of the exhibits were pretty cool. We then checked out the
rock church. Unfortunately we barely missed being able to go in but the outside was so interesting. Helsinki definitely has its fair share of odd yet super intriguing architecture. Next on the Johnsons' list was....
MEXICAN food. We try and find one Mexican place in every city. Helsinki's was TOP notch. It's called
El Rey if you ever make it to Finland. I was so pleased by the selection. I got amazing tacos and we had REAL guac & some yummy strawberry margs. After we wrapped up eating we just walked around for a few hours and headed back to the hotel. The sunset at the harbor was just spectacular and I snapped a few pictures you can see below.
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| gorgeous Helsinki Cathedral |
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| sea city of helsinki |
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| St. John's Church |
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| some yummy apple cider |
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| okay, this just freaked me out.... |
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| rock church |
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| those strawberry margs |
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| breathtaking view in harbor |
On Sunday, we woke up bright and early to held to
Suomenlinna. It's a UNESCO heritage site. It is the amazing fortress that is built on a few islands off the coast of Helsinki in the Baltic Sea. It's been owned by Sweden, Russia and now Finland. It was a gorgeous Sunday and we were so glad we had waited to go until that day. We started the day off with a tour that showed us a bit about the island. After the tour, Nick and I just did some more walking around and found a great little restaurant to grab some grub. Nick ate reindeer and really enjoyed it! We spent most of the day just going into the museums of the island and exploring then we headed back to Helsinki. It was already getting later when we got in and we had 6am flights the next day so we just decided to find an outdoor patio and eat and have a few brews. It was a nice relaxing Sunday night with my husband and I am so thankful for those.
Helsinki was beautiful and I'd definitely check it out again one day....**
**in the summer
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| baltic sea <3 |
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| dat view |
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| staring out of baltic sea |
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| one more snap of the cathedral...farewell helsinki |
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