Helsinki

Couple of practical matters first. You can subscribe to the blog and get the latest blog entries either via an RSS feed or by becoming a fan of the site at Facebook. In both cases, you’ll get notified of new entries as soon as they’re published.

I have the next entry about my Christmas trip already written, but since I’m such a tease (just ask anyone who has personal experience) I’d love to take a short break from that story, and write something else for one entry. A sort of an interlude so that the blog doesn’t get clogged over one theme. I’ll have to write about something else eventually, so I should do it now when I still have a back-up story in case I can’t get anything written in time.

And besides, I have to prove that my normal blog entries will be as incoherent as the travel stories are.

Helsinki. That’s the capital of Finland.

Finland, in case you’ve forgotten (and I don’t blame you if you have), is that strip of land between the old Soviet Block and the Western world. No, not East Germany. The one up north. Further north.. A bit east from Sweden.. And stop right there. Yeah, that place. The covered in snow and full of polar bears.

I’ve lived in this wonderful capital of the vast wilderness for some 28 years of my life. Spent a couple of years in Turku in between at a very low point of my life (was young, needed the money), and that left me in the position to speak about Helsinki without the naivety of someone who’s been here all his life. The sad thing is that I don’t really know anything to tell about the city.

To be frank, a random 5 year old kid from Berlin would probably rob me blind if I got into a bet with them on which one of us knew more about the history and sights of their home town.

My lack of things to tell can be broken into two components.

One. I live and always have lived in the outskirts of the city, in one of the nicer suburban neighborhoods. This means that I haven’t had that many reasons to go to the city center, ever. Plus it takes like 40 minutes get there by bus, plus the waiting at the bus stop.

This seclusion from the actual city means that I missed the whole “Did you hear about that house there? It used to be a secret Nazi base during the Second World War.” type history lesson of the city when I was a kid. I do know which two houses are haunted near the border of Vantaa, but I don’t think that counts as useful knowledge regarding Helsinki. And I haven’t had the chance to correct the mistake and gaining that local knowledge via the other natural way, since I’ve only been dating people who live outside the Ring Roads for my whole life.

For the foreigners, those Ring Roads define the borders of civilization here in Finland. Beyond Ring One, you’re in the countryside, and after crossing Ring Three, you’ve entered the “here be dragons” territory. The roads are inside the Greater Helsinki Area.

The other part of my lack of capability to tell things about Helsinki is the reality that Helsinki is a boring city. And it’s not just me. I’ve been working as a helping hand on a couple of conferences with international guests, and the biggest problem the organizers have faced in every case has been the same “Where can we take them when they’re not listening to the program?”

If you’re in luck and you have to show the city to someone who is interested in something very specific like the Bronze Age history of Finland or the Moomin, you can find them their niche spots to visit, but in general, Helsinki is a tough town. There is the Suomenlinna fort and a couple of really beautiful churches, but that’s it. We’re organizing another conference in May and know that a lot of the people who came to a conference here two years ago will be coming back so we’re in a pickle – we already showed them Suomenlinna and the churches the last time.

“On your right you can see pigeons.”

“That’s a building over there. It looks like a dirty white sugar cube. Most of the people I know hate it and wish it would spontaneously collapse.” (If you’re from Helsinki, you should know which one I’m talking about)

“And that’s a statue of someone. Maybe a president. We can go take a closer look at the sign there if you want to know for sure.”

“That looks like a place where Batman could hang out. No idea what it is.”

“And that’s one of our museums.” (No it wasn’t)

Whoa, this post is getting really depressing when I start remembering what sort of tour guide I’ve been to people visiting this place.

I better just take a short break and return to the blogging in a moment. Here’s something to watch while waiting. (It’s titled Helsinki, so I’m not even steering that far from the subject):

Ah. Much better.

Now to be honest, Helsinki isn’t all that bad. At least when you compare it to Turku (looks nice, but is a soulless husk) or Tampere (has nice people, but is even more boring than Helsinki, if possible). During the summer the weather here is nice, the people are pretty and there is a lot of green stuff all around.

And there are a couple of really awesome things in the city that I love to show people who come here.

First one is the tunnels. We might not have fancy catacombs or ancient sewers here. But we do have tunnels. Tunnels, parking garages, the metro tunnels, maintenance tunnels and even more tunnels. More underground space than you can shake a fist at. It’s pretty impossible to say how far they reach, since quite a lot of them are restricted to military personnel only. But even if you don’t use those, you can pretty much go all around the city center and beyond without ever seeing the sun. This might sound bad, but it’s a great thing in the winter months, when the sun isn’t up there anyways and the streets are covered by half a meter of snow.

The second awesome thing about the city I already forgot, but I’m sure there was one. I remembered it a while ago. Honest. And no, I wasn’t counting Suomenlinna as one. It was too obvious.

But I’d love to discover what there is here to see. And whoa, that was a lot of talk to get to the meat of the post.

Since I’m so hopelessly clueless about Helsinki, I’m going to take advantage of it. I think this is a fantasy everyone has about their home city – I’m going to spend time in Helsinki as a tourist this summer. Book a room at some hotel room in the city center. Get some tourist guidebooks. Go on one of those sight-seeing tours. Ask the people you meet for directions and get lost based on those directions. Possibly even get robbed. The whole nine yards.

Spending time where you live without being a local. A week in Helsinki as an outsider.

Anyone out there who wants to join me?