Helsinki in the home stretch

Despite being in Finland since May 1st, we only just made it to Helsinki, the nation's capital, this week. I'm attending a Nordic-Baltic Food Systems conference and B and the kids are doing their remote work / school thing in this new setting, and then we're all exploring the city in our free time together. 

The city's streets are mostly narrow and cobblestone with a speed limit of 30 and stoplights every couple blocks at minimum. There are loads of people on bikes, pedestrians, and streetcars, and we continue to struggle with Finland's road signs. More on that later. Driving through the downtown core took every bit of concentration we collectively had, and then we had to navigate our Airbnb's parking situation. This required squeezing the car through an extremely narrow passage to a courtyard, and then down into the tightest, most labyrinthian parking garage either of us has ever experienced. Anything larger than the little VW we rented wouldn't have fit down there. Getting into the parking space requires several Austin-Powers-style 80-point turns, with the car's overly sensitive navigation system shrilly beeping the whole time. We vowed to just leave it there below ground until we had to go back to Mikkeli.

On the first afternoon and evening, we walked down the Esplanadi to the Market Square, where vendors in bright orange tents sell frittimuikut (little fried fishes), salmon soup, various reindeer dishes, tourist trinkets and more. I agreed to ride the SkyWheel with the kids, and my reward for that particular bravery was a little paper boat full of muikut. 

Courageous and full of fried fish, we walked up to Senate Square where dozens of people socialized and people-watched on the sun-drenched steps of Helsinki Cathedral, across the square from a row of food and drink stalls with patios. The kids took their gelato over to the stairs to join the crowd, and we got drinks and sat alone for 15 minutes. This counts as a date when you are on a 34-day trip with your children.

That was enough for one night, so we walked home again. Our first impression was that Helsinki is a big city but, like everywhere else we've been in Finland, it's really not busy. There is a lot of infrastructure that seems overbuilt (apart from the parking garages). The landmarks aren't teeming with people. I don't think we've lined up for anything yet. 

The next day we went out in the morning, attempting to make it to the Kallios neighbourhood, which I heard was cool. We didn't make it that far. I can't even remember what we got up to--looking in thrift stores, I think--and then we had lunch (a weird thing called a calzone but definitely not a calzone--there was salad in it and, unfortunately, mayonnaise, and neither of us was sold on this innovation) and I had to split off and go to the conference's opening session. After that, we made a second attempt to get to Kallios. This time we were successful, although we landed there once most things had closed for the evening. This is all well and good because the "cool stuff" they sold were things like records that we just don't have the space to bring back with us. However, on the way, A noticed a restaurant-boat near the Pitkäsilta, a bridge that is still pockmarked with damage from the 1918 Finnish Civil War and WWII. Having said 'no' to an exhausting number of ideas already, we said 'yes' and had dinner on the boat. Sometimes children are right.

The next morning threw a wrench into our "park the car and leave it" plan. Days 2-3 of my conference, it turns out, are happening at the University of Helsinki's campus, which is around 8km from where we're staying. Because of the speed limits and the stoplights, 8km takes almost a half hour in a car. Biking would be the most efficient way to get there, and I would prefer it, but I don't have a helmet here and I'm not mentally prepared for biking in such a strange city on such short notice. The tram would take 45 minutes and some learning that I also wasn't prepared for. Thus, I extracted the car from the dungeon of a parking garage. It was so agitated by the experience--beeping and flashing about how close I was to the walls--that the navigation system didn't click on when I got to the exterior gate and I had to quickly decide which way to go. 

I chose wrong!

In fact I chose to turn the wrong way down a one-way street.

I slowly realized nobody else was going in my direction and it just felt a little off, and finally someone honked, so I pulled a u-turn. When I tried to gas it and get going in the right direction, I somehow knocked it into neutral and just sat there burning rubber for a second. 

This is a good opportunity to tell you how confusing Finland's roads are. For one, they don't use stop signs. *Most* 4-way intersections we've encountered have no stop signs or yields. You are simply meant to yield to the person on your right. This only works if you drive really slow, and in practice, even actual Finnish people seem to just approach the intersection very slowly and whoever gets there first gingerly noses out and everybody sighs with relief because now they know what to do. There is also a sign indicating you're entering a "built up area"--it's just a silhouette of buildings--and this is meant to convey that the speed limit is now 50 unless otherwise posted. 

To let drivers know they're going the wrong way down a one-way street, there is nothing like a "WRONG WAY" sign. And it's not an X--that means you can't stop or park. There aren't generally arrows on the road, and even two-way streets are divided by a white line, not a yellow one, so effectively every road looks like a one-way road by North American standards. After travelling nearly a block I finally saw the tiny symbol for "no entry", but pretty much around the same time somebody honked. 

I have concluded that the Finns are not as good at conveying things with symbols as they think they are. I believe the same confidence driving whoever designed the oven at our Mikkeli Airbnb was at play in the development of road and traffic signs. It's an attempt to be universal but it is actually the most private language. Or I'm a North American boor, I dunno.

In any event, I made it to the conference and I'll do it again tomorrow. And after getting there and back and re-parking the car, we walked back down to the market square and caught a ferry to Suomenlinna, one of the 330 islands in the archipelago around Helsinki, which is a fortress dating back to the 1700s that now has about 800 people living on it, a bunch of shops and restaurants, and the old walls and buildings of the fortress itself. The latter changed hands between Sweden, Russia and Finland before being decommissioned (or whatever it's called with fortresses) and turned into a tourist destination and UNESCO heritage site. It was a really cool way to spend a sunny afternoon, hunching through tunnels, peeking into old bunkers, and climbing over embankments. We weren't expecting it to be such a highlight. It's back to Mikkeli tomorrow for two more sleeps, and then we're homeward bound.