Helsinki in 24 Hours

After making it an early night on Saturday after 17 hours of traveling and a quick stroll around the city, we settled into our unique hotel room not far from the city center. It is a front-desk/key/maid-less chain of hotels. Each room has an electronic key pad and our passcode was emailed to us prior to arrival. The room looks like something out of an IKEA catalog, and is roomy and comfortable.

We decided to sleep in on Sunday to sleep off the jet lag, but still got a fairly early start to the day around 11am. We strolled down to the City Tourist office to book our train and ferry tickets to Aland (more to come on that in a later post). We walked through the open air market near the port of Helsinki, visited the Helsinki City Museum, and captured photos of various cathedrals. Just standing and looking around, one can tell that the city is fairly new and has a lot of Russian influences.

After taking in much of the city center, we headed over to the well-known Hakaniemi Market. There were an abundance of vendors selling clothes, jewelry, furs, and food, including reindeer meatballs (which Chris ate for lunch, and I must admit, are quite tasty).

It has been very easy to speak with Finns thus far. We anticipated not being able to communicate easily with the Finns, but everyone has been very nice and helpful, and speaks English very well. We still try our best though, even if we have to stand looking through our travel book to figure out what to order or how to ask for something.

The next taste of Helsinki included a beer bar and a Ukranian meal... more of that to come next!