Adventures in Finland
Did you know that the Finns have a particular relationship with language, don’t like to waste words on small talk and favour being concise? And now to a blog post about my experience of a holiday there that may or may not pay homage to this fact. It began in Lapland in ‘minus’ conditions, beautiful blue skies and a mostly flat landscape but for the one mountain range I was skiing very unskilfully on while overlooking miles and miles of spruce trees, some bent over almost in half under the weight of thick powder snow.
Moomins are easy to imagine in Lapland – though also very present on the front of juice bottles and snacks, stationary, kitchen bits and so on – as the atmosphere conjures up the appealing peculiarities of Tove Janson’s creation. This stems a bit from the local people who are equal parts dour and friendly, like Glaswegians but 80% less chattier as per the aforementioned conciseness fact. We asked a Finnish waiter of average build if he was from Lapland and he looked totally insulted and told us ‘no, they’re all about this high’ motioning to roughly my waist height.
Before I swiftly move on to Helsinki part of this holiday I’m going to leave Lapland on our holiday highlight, which was a husky sleigh ride through a forest dappled with sunshine, cheeks slapped with invigorating air.
We felt the cold almost more in milder Helsinki because we stopped wearing our thermal leggings under our trousers and it was still in the minuses. The sky was tremendously dreich and that made for a bit of moaning from the under eight’s – and who am I kidding the over 38’s too. But it did mean everyone was grateful to visit art galleries, including the Steven Holl designed Kiasma and Ateneum where we saw the brilliant Japanomania exhibition, as well as a serene public library. I have a few highlights from our two days here, which I’m saving for their own post. For now here’s a pictorial overview of the city with its history of design, home as it is of Marimekko, Alvar Aalto and Artek – there was a strong whiff of good taste and love of detail all around from the tidy buildings, old and new, the sizeable design district, the grotesque gargoyles and the marvellous train station.
Helsinki Central train station by Eliel Saarinen, father of Eero
How about that sky
Rikhardinkatu Library, which has an English language section
The crazy moulded staircase in the flagship Artek shop
Gorgeous cups in Lokal Helsinki, in the design district
Samuji in the design district
Shut on a sunday – Helsinki University Library
If it weren’t for that sky, I could totally live there.
Oooft that looks nice. The train station is wonderful, very imposing! Now, what did you buy, show and tell please!
But I never superficially go on about that do I? You have the wrong blog I think…
my family live in Norway so I visit a lot but never been to Finland and would like to. we were there at Easter and always say ‘we could live here..if the weather was a bit better’.
re: Finland – I follow this guy on instagram called Konsta Punkka who is based in Helsinki and he take the most AMAZING photos of the outdoor world in Finland. just beautiful
Ooh thanks Fi, I’ll look that up now. Norway is totally beautiful. I have been once as my husband’s friend lives there and it was very sunny the whole time – though he insisted that was unusual.
Wow, architecture in Finland is sooo beautiful. there’s everything I like – a touch of brutal monumentalism of concrete, modernistic minimalism with a bit of industrial aesthetics and NEONS – in some countries used in mid XX, but then removed, now recognized to have a lot of style!