Helsinki

Before I left Finland altogether, I spent a couple of days in the capital, Helsinki. And I thought I'd make a little blog post about that here. From the blog statistics, I can see that not everyone that reads this blog is Finnish, so hopefully some of this will be new to you :D The purpose of my trip to Helsinki was to see some friends and relatives. So here's a few photos...

This is the side entrance of the main railway station. You can't really see it in the picture but it says RAUTATIEASEMA JÄRNVÄGSTATION. That's "railway station" in Finnish and then samma på svenska (which means "same in Swedish"). Helsinki is one of Finland's bilingual municipalities, so all the signs and everything are in both languages. People are often surprised when I tell them that I know Swedish and that Finland has two official languages. Here's a map showing you the different language areas in Finland, and the colour explanations are below.

(This picture is from Wikipedia.)

I lived in the east of Finland, and I still had to learn Swedish in school, just like everyone else in the country. Don't get me wrong, I liked studying Swedish, it's a super easy language to learn and it's fun. But a lot of people don't like studying it. And I admit that for me too Russian, for example, would have been a lot more useful than Swedish, living where I did. It could have opened doors to better summer jobs, and of course you meet a lot more Russians than Swedes in Eastern Finland. So that map sort of makes you wonder...

It is probably kind of a relic from when the area of Finland was a part of Sweden, and all the government, administration and culture (like literature and stuff) was in Swedish, and Finnish was considered a language of the lower classes, and not really a civilized language at all. Even after the position of Finnish language improved, and after Finland became independent there has always been a minority of Swedish speaking (or bilingual) Finns, and now that there is talk of maybe making Swedish optional in schools, some seem to fear that this would jeopardize the position and the services of the Swedish speaking population. Which is like 6 % of the inhabitants of Finland.

By the way, Helsinki in Swedish is Helsingfors.

During my holiday I visited my relatives in Tohmajärvi, and took this picture of the door of the local food store.

It says "welcome" in Finnish and Russian. Tohmajärvi is situated in the east about 10 kilometers from the Russian border, so a lot of their road signs etc have the texts in both languages. But during Christmas and New Year a huge amount of Russians travel to Finland for shopping (apparently Finland is cheaper and the quality is better) and skiing etc, so even in Helsinki there would be temporary signs and notifications in Russian.

But now I got sidetracked, let's get on with the pictures.

Here's another one of the railway station in the city centre.

There is an Irish bar called Dubliner in the city centre too! I just happened to pass it. (Finnish people think Ireland and everything Irish is cool. Especially the pubs.)

Helsinki has big buildings.

Ale in this case doesn't refer to beer, but it's short for "alennusmyynti" which means SALE. (And rea is the same in Swedish.)

I went to Stockmann (a big department store) and their food section to buy a cake and everything looked pretty yummy.

There's the world trade center. Helsinki version.

Christmas lights were still up!

Helsinki is Finland's biggest city, and it differs from the rest of the country in a lot of ways. The city is built completely differently than the average Finnish town, the architecture is partially a lot older. It's also the only place that has trams, local trains and a metro system.

That's a tram.

This music video by Bomfunk MC's was filmed in the Helsinki underground! So watch it if you want to see what it looks like and hear a Finnish song. :D (The lyrics are in English though.)

Waiting for the tram to take me to my destination... 

That's the cake!

That's some building opposite me. I believe it's still the Stockmann building.

That board tells you when the next tram is coming.

That's all the pictures I took, but anyway, Helsinki is a nice city to visit. It's big but not too huge and it has a lot of things to see. The first time I visited Helsinki was when I was... around 10 maybe? We bought Helsinki cards, which are these cards that they make for tourists, and for whatever the price is you get access to all the public transport and reductions on museum tickets and things like that. Nowadays my dad lives in the neighboring city called Vantaa, so when I would visit him I would often also go to Helsinki. It's a 40 minute bus drive. And now a few friends also live there so I go there to meet them too!

There are some nice buildings in Helsinki that I didn't get the chance to photograph now, but I borrowed some from other sites...

This is the parliament building. That's where the magic happens (= they make all the big decisions). This is basically right in the city centre. I think they have a big extension building now behind that one... I guess they couldn't fit the 200 MP's in there. I got the picture from here.

Another beautiful building is the Helsinki cathedral. It faces the Senate Square, which was built in the 1800's (as was the church), so the architectural style is very coherent. I got the picture from here.

But yeeeaaahh I suppose that is all I have to say about Helsinki right now. Go visit! And go during the summer, it'll be a lot nicer. It's often very windy and rainy in the winter. Kinda like Galway...

Christmas --> now

We celebrate Christmas on the 24th, also known as Christmas Eve. Here's how it goes:

At around 11 a.m. we have rice porridge. There's an almond in the batch, and whoever gets the almond on their plate will be lucky the next year. Guess who got the almond? :O It was me. (Although my mom put two almonds in it this time. But still)

The Christmas tree was brought in in the morning of Christmas Eve.

There's this children's show on tv called "Santa's hotline", where children around the country can call in and speak with Santa. And sing a song to him. And after that they show The Snowman. It's a British animation from 1982. Apparently it's been shown on Finnish tv every Christmas Eve morning since 1983, and I've watched it most Christmases since I can remember. So that's definitely a Christmas tradition for me. And probably a lot of people!

After that, right before noon, there's another thing on tv that a lot of people watch on Christmas Eve. "The Declaration of Christmas Peace". It's apparently some ancient Nordic tradition or something. But anyway,  the thing is in Turku, and some guy reads the declaration from an old-looking scroll, standing on the balcony of an old house. And there's a choir and an orchestra there and they play and sing a few songs, and also there's thousands of people there watching it. Plus a million watching it on tv.

After that we just hang out, decorate the tree, prepare the food for dinner and stuff!

The central element of the Christmas dinner is the ham:

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture until after we had already mauled it... And it was GOOOD! Yum yum. Yum.

My other favorite is the smoked whitefish... Yum.

My portion (but I took seconds and thirds): ham, potato, salad, whitefish, "liver box", "rutabaga box".

Ok. Liver box (maksalaatikko) and rutabaga box (lanttulaatikko) are direct translations. Laatikko = box. That just refers to the shape of the dish that it's commonly baked in.

Liver box consists of liver, rice and I don't know what else, but it's good. :D And it's baked in an oven. You can see a little of it on my plate there, it's the brown stuff between the orange stuff and the fish.

Rutabaga box... Well, first of all, rutabaga is the American term for the vegetable. For some reason the Irish call it turnip, which is crazy, because turnip is a completely different vegetable! You can't call two different vegetables by the same name?! So I'm calling it rutabaga. Anyway, the box contains rutabaga, flour, syrup... spices and stuff... I don't really know, I haven't made it, but it's sooo good. Some people hate it though. But it's yummy. It's the orange goo on my plate. Delicious.

A couple of the Karelian pies we made with some salmon... Also VERY yummy.

And this is the dessert. I'm not going to attempt translating the name... but it's a "soup" made of dried fruits, like pear, apricot, prune, apple etc. And it's served with whipped cream. Mmmm.

Some Christmasy flowers, candles and the thing hanging from the ceiling is called a himmeli. I don't know if there's an English translation, but in Swedish the word himmel means sky/heaven, so it's got something to do with that. I would guess this is another Nordic Christmas tradition.

So we had dinner around 5 pm, and sometime after that we opened our presents.

Later in the evening I took a Christmas sauna with my mom! First sauna of my holiday, by the way :o Weird that I waited a week.

It started snowing the night before Christmas Eve, and the snow flakes continued flowing down all day long! It was only like -1 or -2, and the sun wasn't shining. (Duh, if it's snowing, there'll be clouds.)

But the next day it was really pretty! Here are some photos:

It was snowy and sunny and about -4. Perfect weather for skiing! So we went for a short ski trip (you can't even call it a trip, it was like 30 minutes) with my mom.

I used my mom's old skis since I don't own a pair of my own anymore.

Here we go!

On Christmas Day we had the same dinner as Christmas Eve. There was plenty of food.

On St. Stephen's Day (or Boxing Day or whatever you want to call it, the 26th of December anyway) there was a huge storm in Finland. It mostly hit Southern Finland, and the electricity and water were out from like 200 000 homes. I'm sure Sweden and Norway are affected by the same storm.

We only got a bit of the wind yesterday, but we got to keep our electricity and all, but today, on the 27th, there is ANOTHER storm :D and this time the wind is even harder here and it's snowing sideways. But it's supposedly a bit calmer than yesterday's storm.

That's not a very clear video clip but that shaky white stuff is snow. :D (And the sound in the background is the television.)