I didn’t quite go straight from Saint Petersburg to Helsinki. There were two days – down from three thanks to the ghost bus in Poland - in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, in between. It’s a pleasant, charming but more or less uninteresting city, and I’m going to bypass writing about it rather than try to conjure entertaining anecdotes out of thin air.
At least I had people to talk to again, after two weeks in Russia where I felt isolated from fellow travellers. Now, in Tallinn, I was back on the backpacker circuit, and I was sharing the dorm with three young Dutch women, who were coming to the end of a swing through the Baltic states. And we had two Poles, Katarina and Lucasz. Katarina told me she was from Osweicim. “Perhaps you’ve heard of –“
“Yep. I’ve heard of it.”, I cut her off. I’ve been there. Osweicim is the Polish name for the town the Germans called Auschwitz. Turning to Lucasz, I noted that both were from Poland and asked if they were travelling together.
“NOOOOOOO!!!!”
Lucasz never got a chance to reply. Katarina made it very clear that they were NOT travelling together. Loudly and indignantly. The Dutch girls and I laughed uncomfortably. Poor Lucasz.
Once done with my pleasant, charming, but more or less uninteresting stay in Tallinn, it was time for a ferry to Helsinki. I can’t begin to quantify, much less explain, my love for ferries. The idea of a cruise ship holiday holds no appeal. I know many people who love them, but I want to be the author of my own travel plans, not have them packaged for me, no matter how nice the wrapping. But a no-frills, point to point ferry crossing is by far my favourite way to travel. They’re surprisingly easy to sleep on, and watching the sea go by is like watching Test cricket: mostly uneventful, borderline dull, at times, but somehow engrossing anyway. I could do it for days. Indeed, I’m suddenly so in love with Scandinavia that I was reading up on Norway – a country I’m bypassing this time – and discovered a ferry that runs from the south all the way up into the Arctic Circle. It takes five and a half days, and I’m up for it. Tallinn to Helsinki only takes two and a half hours, but I made the most of them, finding a seat out on the sun deck, listening to Eric Clapton and watching the Baltic Sea. Bliss.
Helsinki had almost too easy a time winning my affection. After a trying couple of weeks in Russia I was in Finland, where stuff just *works*. I found my way to the hostel, where the staff spoke English, where the kitchen had butter knives and a toaster, where the showers worked perfectly. The only problem was they had assigned me a top bunk. I hate top bunks. I’ve had enough of top bunks.
“Hmm”, I said, rattling the bed until it made just enough noise to suit my purposes. “Here’s the thing. Because I’m diabetic I have to wake up two or three times during the night to test,” – sometimes, though not routinely true – “and what I’ve found is that if I have a bottom bunk I disturb other people in the dorm far less often. Do you think you could find me a bottom bunk? I don’t mind either way, really, but it could make the other guests more comfortable…”
On balance I’d rather not have the diabetes card at all, but if it’s going to be in my hand I might as well play it.
After a short recharge in my bottom bunk, then, I set off to explore. I found a conveyor belt set into the wall of the nearest supermarket, with a number of buttons beside it. Befuddled, I asked a staff member what it was (everybody in Scandinavia speaks English, and I admittedly started taking it for granted very quickly). It’s a bottle recycling machine for those container deposit schemes like they have in South Australia. You take them to the supermarket, feed them into the wall – you can hear it crunching – and get a receipt to use as a discount against your purchases. Or you do, as long as you don’t do what I did and press the wrong button, so that my refund was donated to some unknown charity instead. I hope it’s a good one.
My delight with the bottle monster was as nothing compared to what I found upon entering a shopping centre. I don’t want to overstate my level of victimhood, but wrong-handed people don’t know how good they have it in a right-handed world. Scissors are designed for them. Computer keyboards are designed for them. Door handles, ATMs, microwaves and even our writing system, going from left to right, is designed for them. I can’t say I’ve ever felt massively disadvantaged when trying to use one of those touch screen maps in a shopping centre, but Finland has me covered anyway. The screen had a button in the corner that read ‘Left Handed?’ I pressed it, curiously, and the entire display moved from one side to the other, so I could reach all the buttons with my left hand. This was the future. It’s much colder and it has more cobblestones than I expected, but otherwise I was pretty happy with it.
My whimsical mood continued at the zoo that afternoon. It’s nothing particularly special, as far as European zoos go, apart from its setting: it takes up an entire island in the middle of Helsinki’s harbour. Getting there meant another ferry, and then I was just as interested in wandering around the edge of the island as I was in the animals. I found a wild red squirrel and played peek-a-boo around a tree trunk for a minute or so, before the squirrel cheated by climbing up into the higher branches. I found a play area with trampolines set into the ground, and gingerly tested if they’d take my weight: they did. I was the most relaxed I’d been since, I don’t know, maybe back in Croatia?
The next day was assigned to Helsinki’s biggest attraction, a fortress island (another ferry!) called Suomenlinna. But it was raining when I left the hostel so I visited the Finnish Design Museum while I waited for the weather to clear. It makes sense that Scandinavians are so good at design: when you’re cooped up inside for nine months of the year it’s understandable that you might want things to look nice. The museum was eager to point out that Finland is home to more than Nokia: they also take credit for Angry Birds, those egg-shaped chairs, and even the orange-handled scissors that are in every government office in every country in the world. Those scissors are only designed for right-handed people. At least they learned their lesson with the touch screens.
Suomenlinna is, as I said, a fortress island (or several inter-connected islands, rather) that lies at the mouth of Helsinki harbour. An information board said it’s one of the few island fortresses to have served as a base for three different countries (Sweden, Russia and Finland), which prompts me to question if it was really all that successful as a fortress. Now it’s Helsinki’s go-to public park, despite still having some off-limits military areas. There are signs saying where you can’t go, but no guards, much less guns. That’s just not how they do things in Scandinavia.
My afternoon at Suomenlinna was an echo of one of my favourite days in the US two years ago when, on a whim, I boarded a $2 ferry to something called ‘Governors Island’ in New York. It, too, was a former naval base, and despite being only a few hundred metres off Manhattan – and having great views of the Statue of Liberty – it felt like wandering about a small rural town. Suomenlinna wasn’t *quite* as magical as that day, only because I knew broadly what to expect. But I enjoyed it all the same, and spent hours scrabbling up and down rocks and creeping through tunnels. I even saw – but was unable to photograph – a poodle wearing sneakers.
Helsinki’s a small city and I’d already exhausted my to-do list on the first two days, so I roamed aimlessly on day three. As if to confirm that this really is a progressive utopia, I found a public toilet that was not only free – in Europe! – but also clean and, best of all, had a separate stall for the urinal, which was designed for use by either men or women. I’m regularly embarrassed by my privilege as I walk straight past a long line of women waiting to use toilet: Helsinki has it sorted. Don’t think it was designed for left-handers though.
Continuing my walk, I came across a man fishing with his terrier, who graciously allowed me to take a photo:
It’s hard not to love a city that dresses its poodles in sneakers and its terriers in life jackets.
My overnight ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm was the single most expensive journey of the entire trip: €118 for a four bunk cabin underneath the car deck, but I just had to shrug my shoulders and accept I was in Scandinavia. And I felt much better about the cost after receiving a free upgrade to my own cabin:
It had a bathroom. It had a TV. It had a window… no it didn’t. Behind those curtains is a solid wall. But it had curtains.
I woke up in time to be back out on the deck as we passed through the Stockholm Archipelago and into the city, where I saw a giraffe:
And later that day I saw a duck, too:
It’s hard not to love a city that dresses its cranes as giraffes and its boats as ducks.
Loving the hostel didn’t come quite so easily. I knew not to expect luxury - I was in Scandinavia in July, after all, and finding a decent place to stay meant flirting with bankruptcy – but I hadn’t expected a dungeon. The rooms at this place were all underground, with no windows. That would have been fine, except that I appeared to be in with permanent residents who were both agoraphobic – they never left – and photophobia, because the room was kept in perpetual darkness. Turning on the main light apparently wasn’t the done thing, and there were complaints if I used my reading light for more than a few minutes too.
I’ve been in rooms with inconsiderate people, loud people and smelly people, but these troglodytes were the worst, simply because the darkness was so all-enveloping. I tried to stay out of there as much as I could, which is a problem when your dorm room should be somewhere you feel comfortable. Mind you, while sitting in the common area I got stuck in a conversation with an elderly Trump voter, who claimed that Hillary Clinton had been in a secret lesbian relationship with her staffer, Huma Abedin for 40 years (Abedin is 41 years old). But that’s not all, Barack Obama is apparently secretly gay too, and a secret Muslim as well. Who keeps giving these people passports? Maybe I should have stayed in the dark.
The first order of business upon arriving in Stockholm was the footy: an anxious moment, as up until this point the Swans had only ever won matches when I was in formerly Communist countries. Sweden has at least partially broken the curse, but it was neutral during the Cold War, and we remain winless in the NATO countries: I may yet need to defect if anything is going to come of this bizarre season.
Finally, in the afternoon, I headed out into an unexpectedly wonderful city, pairing Sydney’s looks with Melbourne’s character:
All I need is for Stockholm to move about 1000km closer to the equator, so that it has a liveable climate for more than three months of the year, and an obscenely high-paying job so I can afford to eat and I’d move here in an instant. I’d even buy a bike.
I was heading for Djurgården, an island ten minutes walk from the city centre that has a bunch of museums including the Nordic Museum (which I skipped), a Sovereign Hill-style place called Skansen (also skipped), and the ABBA Museum (why why, would I ever want to go?). The one I did visit was the Vasa Museum. An ostensibly cutting-edge warship when it was built in 1628, the Vasa had barely gotten out of Stockholm harbour before it capsized and sank, 1300 metres into its maiden voyage. The wreck was dredged up more than 300 years later, pieced back together and now looks rather stunning given all it has been through:
The museum tells the ship’s story, of course, including an exhibit about an inquest into the tragedy. It was hastily concluded, without releasing its findings, when early evidence began to point directly to the king being at fault for demanding it carry too many cannons. Awkward.
I headed back to Djurgården the next day - a Sunday – for a walk. The island is long and slender – it stretches for more than three kilometres – and once you get past Skansen it turns into a more rugged, rural version of Central Park. But for the high rises being built across the channel I might have been way out in the Scandinavian forest:
I stayed out there for hours, getting lost, finding my way, then getting lost again: twice I thought I was on one side of the island, only to realise that South was actually North. Eventually I settled down beside the water to work on finishing my Saint Petersburg blog post, and headed back into town at dinner time. I’d planned to venture into the old city – Gamla Stan – where I hoped to wait out the crowds and take some photos during the night, when the streets would be almost deserted. I made the mistake of testing my blood sugar, though, and it was dangerously high despite having walked what must have been at least 15km. Back to the dungeon dorm, then. Just another day on the diabetic magical mystery tour.
I had to settle for wandering around Gamla Stan the next day. I checked out the Nobel (prize) Museum, but it was mostly oriented towards children, and I didn’t stay very long. I did learn how insulin was discovered, though: the magical mystery tour sucks, but it’s the better of two bad options. I might be biased, but I reckon they deserved their Nobel Prize.
And so I killed time by following blind alleys into more blind alleys and window shopping. I found a British snack food store that sold Bundaberg ginger beer: exciting not because I drink ginger beer (I don’t) but because if they thought Bundaberg was British they might have made the same mistake with Vegemite. I didn’t mention it in my Saint Petersburg post – it was self-pitying enough – but my last remaining Vegemite went missing there, and it’s the most upsetting loss since my insulin in Vienna. Alas, they only had Marmite, and I’d rather eat dry bread than accept an inferior (and English) substitute. I also poked my head into a vintage collectibles store. The usual sort of stuff: antique glassware, books, Nazi stamps, postcards...
Wait, what? Yeah:
There was a stunned German man taking photos, and I asked what he thought, but he was genuinely speechless. Are they souvenirs of evil, that ought simply to be destroyed? Or are they just stamps? I could be convinced either way.
Leaving that question unresolved, I headed back to the hostel to collect my bags, ready to board a train to Denmark. It was day 90 on my 90 day Schengen visa. Denmark, like Sweden, is a Schengen country. This could yet prove interesting.
fascinating as ever for your avid followers
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