After the excitement of Russia we headed to neat and tidy and stylish Helsinki. We really loved this city but here we felt the dollar's decline more than anywhere on our trip. A beer at the hotel bar was 6 Euros, around 10 dollars.
We took a bus from St Pete's and on the way we talked with a very pleasant Finn who gave us some ideas on what to see in the city and came up with a quote that we thought fitting-"without Winter there is no Finland."
We were only in Finland 4 days but we made much of these days traveling to the many islands in the Helsinki area via the incredible tram, ferry and bus system that serves the area. This reminds me of another quote we heard during the trip, "the Soviet Union created a workers paradise, in Finland." Finland really is a social democratic wonderland-free health care, an extensive mass transit system that serves all, generous paternity and vacation benefits, a strong labor movement and all this with much of the flash of capitalism because of the Finish/Scandinavian sense of style which is omnipresent.
Beyond enjoying the workers' paradise we moved outside the central city a few times to enjoy the islands that make up southern Finland. The two places we enjoyed the most were the World Heritage site Suomenlinna and Seurasaari Open Air Museum. Both places take visitors way back and in the case of the Seurasaari all the way back to the iron age.
And on Suomenlinna we were able to tour part of the Finnish Navy that was hidden from the Soviets in the 1940's:
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We also felt the sting of the declining dollar last year so this year, based on a tip from some Mad River people we did a bicycle/castle trip here:
http://castlevacation.blogspot.com
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