Finland

Fun fact before the rest of my post: Helsinki is the second-northernmost capital in the world, after Reykjavik, Iceland, at 60 degrees north, which puts it at a full five degrees north of Moscow and fifteen degrees north of Ottawa. This is the furthest north I have ever been! It is also why Helsinki was really really cold.

Now for my actual blog post:
As I said in my previous blog post, after leaving Estonia, we headed to the ferry to take a boat ride to Helsinki, Finland. The boat ride was short, less than two hours. It was definitely a fun two hours though. There was a fantastic sunset, despite the extreme cold and on the deck.

Sunset on the deck

We arrived in Helsinki pretty late in the evening, and we were all tired so we decided to have a cozy night in the hotel. Me and a group of girls went to the grocery store and bought some Finnish candy (I checked to make sure that was all actually made in Finland before buying) and headed back to the hotel. I bought these really delicious chocolate mint candies and there were some very good gummy bear type candies. However, there were also some flops with the candy, especially the one that was like eating spongy flavorless jelly. In the grocery store, we also had our first exposure to the Finnish language on signs. Let me just say, that I seriously pity anyone who tries to learn Finnish. I thought Danish was hard. One word I kept seeing all over Finland, for example, was "uutuus." That doesn't even look like a word. Apparently, gramamar in Finnish is also extremely difficult. I was told they have 22 different noun cases. I don't really even know what a noun case is, other than that we don't have them in English.
But anyway, the next morning, we woke up and went to the hotel breakfast. Here I learned something very important and upsetting to me about Finnish cuisine. Finns love fish. I hate fish. Remember, I tried the tongue; I tried the turnip, but fish I just cannot imagine ever enjoying. And yet, even the Finnish breakfast buffet was filled with more kinds of fish than I knew existed. Fortunately, the buffet was big enough that i managed to find good alternatives for breakfast. After eating, we headed to the Rock Church, which is an active Lutheran church in Finland, that was basically carved out of rocks in the ground. It was a really neat church, certainly different from any church I had seen before, and there was a really nice piano player there.

Rock Church

Next we got on the subway to our semi-academic, semi-cultural visit to the Helsinki University Museum. Most of the museum focused on medical history, which was definitely interesting. My personal favorite single item in the museum, however, was a set of woolly mammoth tusks, which were really coolly displayed on a painting of a woolly mammoth.

Old Wheelchair in the museum

Woolly Mammoth Tusks

We were on our own for lunch, so me and my group of friends went to a cafe right across from the museum and some other really nice looking buildings. I'd say about 90% of the menu was fish, but I managed to find a really good quiche dish, that was thankfully fish free. Most everyone else ordered a mushroom and salmon soup. I'd never heard of mushroom soup before, and the salmon in the soup sounded questionable, but all reports were that the soup was excellent.

The view from our seats in the Cafe

Cool Building

Also cool building

Next we had an academic visit to a Finnish Health Center, which was really big and had primary care, secondary treatment, dental care, and much more all in one building. One thing we learned that definitely fascinated much of our group is that all orthodontic care is free to children under 18 in Finland! Even Denmark doesn't have free dental care! But in Finland, braces are free! How many American parents would absolutely LOVE that?
Dinner that night was quite interesting. First we had soup, that was my second encounter of the day with mushroom soup (this one without fish, however). As I said, I was a little suspicious of it, but I tried it and it was probably the greatest soup I've ever eaten. It was warm and just plain old delicious. The main course for most people was fish but I fortunately filled out on some DIS form some where that I don't eat fish, so I was provided with a good, fish-free meal. But really, the Finns love fish. Dessert was... interesting. Honestly, I didn't really like it. It was kind of a berry mush. It was basically like eating unsweetened, watered down berry jam. Interesting to try, but not something I would eat again.
After an academic visit the next day, we took a trip to a traditional Finnish sauna, one of the oldest in Helsinki. At first I wasn't so sure about this. A sauna seemed like an odd place to visit, until our leader told us just how much of a Finnish tradition saunas are. In Finland, there are 5.3 million people and a whopping 1.6 million saunas, an average of one per household! When Finns go to the sauna, which they generally do at least once per week, if not more, they will stay for 2.5 hours. They alternate their time between the hot sauna room and cold showers, or in a truly traditional shower, jumping in a cold lake. People will even hold business meetings in saunas. (I find that one a little odd, considering that Finnish people will not wear any clothes in the sauna, so they're basically conducting their business meetings naked, but I guess that's their culture.)
So, as we were standing outside the sauna building, ready to go in, a 60ish year old man, all old and wrinkly, came out of the building, dressed only in a towel around his waist and sat down outside, on the bench to smoke a cigarrette, not ashamed at all to not be wearing anything more than a towel in front of a group of 30 American twenty year olds.
In the sauna, the males and females separated into separate sauna rooms and the girls all went in, wearing towels, instead of doing it the truly traditional way. The sauna was hot! A thermometer at the top of the room read 65 degrees. When the girl said that, I was confused, because it seemed so much hotter than 65. Then I remembered. The room was 65 degrees celcius, which is almost 150 degrees fahrenheit! That was at the very top of the room however, and I stuck to the lower tiers, so it was a little cooler than that for me.

Sauna. Obviously.

That night we went to the Helsinki Symphony Orchestra, which was cool because the conductor reminded me of Santa Claus. He had a huge white beard, a big round belly, and he seemed extremely jolly. After the orchestra, a group of us tried going out to a bar to get a drink, where we encountered something we were really not used to: IDing! Denmark has extremely liberal alcohol laws, and we never even stopped to think that those rules were not universal in Europe. So despite the fact that we were all over the legal drinking age in Finland (18) a few in the group were not carrying their IDs so we just decided to walk back to our hotel. On our way back, we saw some really strange looking college-aged kids. I don't mean the kids were stange looking actually, but rather their outfits were. They were all wearing jumpsuits. Like the kind of jumpsuit you would expect a military pilot or prison inmate to wear. And these jumpsuits were various colors and covered in all sorts of patches from what looked like companies. We asked our leader about these the next day who told us that college kids from the same school and class will all wear identical jumpsuits. Not to classes, however. They wear them to parties and to bars to show pride for their groups. Sort of like how lots of Americans will wear their Greek fraternity letters, he explained. And the patches are indeed from businesses. The students will write to companies and ask them to sponsor them! I didn't take any pictures of this, cause it was dark and rainy, but here's a link I pulled off google: http://www.personal.psu.edu/rbc4/students1.jpg

Of course, we got lost, because as I already explained Finnish words all basically look like: Uutuåssnnöössii and are basically impossible for a foreigner to figure out. Then something happened that would never happen in Denmark. We were staring confused at our map, trying to look at the street signs which may have been written in the greek alphabet, when a couple of Finns stopped, and asked us if we needed help! That's just not something that happens in Denmark. Not to say that Danes aren't perfectly willing to help with directions when asked, but they certainly would never offer them to a confused looking group of tourists on the street without prompting. The directions got us got us back to our hotel, safe and sound, but not without a detour at a public restroom. I really had to use the bathroom and I knew we were still a twenty minute walk from home so we stopped at a train station. They charge one Euro ($1.50) to open the bathroom door. However, the lock on the door only takes one Euro coins, while I only had a two Euro coin. There was a machine where you can change your two Euro pieces into one Euro pieces. However, when I put my two Euro coin into the machine it spit back one one Euro coin. And one small metal washer. So in other words I paid three dollars to use the bathroom. Ugh.

The next day was our final day of the study tour and it was a good one. We all went to the contemporary art museum in Finland, which certainly had some interesting things to look at. Some of it was cool and interesting, but some of it, I just didn't get. Nonetheless a good time was had by all.

Inside the art museum

Disturbing art

Creepy art

Shiny art

Delicious art, my favorite kind!

Is this art?

Finally, we went to the airport, boarded our flight, and flew home to Copenhagen, where it was three degrees warmer and speaks a language that's not quite as horrible as Finnish, and has roads that I can sort of get around. So definitely an amazing week, but also very nice to come back to Denmark.