Helsinki is great, but it helps we have had more glorious weather – to the point of getting sunburnt!
It’s not a beautiful place like Stockholm but it is stuffed with beauty, great architecture and amazing public art
Our hotel is great, comfortable, clean, right on a tram stop and close to town. And on a harbour too
Helsinki has only a few headline attractions – the kauppatori, or market square is one, for the market itself, and also as the jumping off point for sightseeing boats and public ferries to Suomenlinna, a former military fortress and now heritage site and recreation reserve. it’s a short ferry ride and we went there on a sparkling sunny day – hence the sunburn!
The other big attractions, other than the museums (we only visited one, the design museum, which was interesting), are the orthodox cathedral, and this massive thing. (The coaches are your clue as to why we didn’t investigate the interior)
But as always, I preferred green to concrete, so we took a short bus ride to Seurasaari, an island partly occupied by an open air museum. We were there too early to go inside the buildings, but they weren’t of huge interest. The lovely green landscape and the lake were
This blurry photo is my record of my first sight of a red squirrel in the wild
And we spotted a lesser woodpecker doing his thing
On the whole, this trip has been incredibly fauna poor, except for the seabirds in Iceland. A bit of a disappointment, but we’ll struggle on 🙂