Drive from Kiruna - 10 - Helsinki (7 & 8 Jan 23)

 The drive from Kotka to Helsinki was only an hour and a half, which made a pleasant change from 5-6 hour drives.  It also took us through the old town of Porvoo, which was pretty cool.

Porvoo

We didn't stay in Porvoo too long, but just long enough to get scammed! One of the kids needed to use the toilet, so we pulled up in a public park where there was a small toilet block.  The first part of the scam was that it cost €1.50 to use the toilets, but when nature calls it calls... payment was made through a little eftpos style box which could do tap-and-go or insert a card.  It rejected my card twice, so I inserted it.  A robotic voice told us it was 'processing' and then it pinged, flashed green and charged my card the 1.5 euro.  Nothing happened. None of the doors opened or even unlocked.  We tried to pull on each of them but they stayed locked.  Working on the fool me once, shame on you policy we decided that we could wait until we arrived in Helsink, but it did mean that we didn't spend much time in Porvoo.

One thing I love in the Nordic winter is the mini frozen waterfalls on the rocks at the side of the road:

Coming into Helsinki, we caught sight of the Uspenski Cathedral which we planned to visit the next day:

We firstly found our hotel for the night, but we couldn't check in for a few hours, so we headed to a nearby shopping centre for lunch and toilet stops.  We then decided to plan out the route that we would need to take for our early morning ferry to Tallinn on the 9th. We located the carpark and ferry terminal as well as this very cool ice skating rink:

and this slightly disturbing statue:

The statue is called Bad Bad Boy, and yes it is peeing. Originally it was located in market square where it peed into the harbour, but it has since been relocated to the ferry terminal and is likely one of the first things people arriving by ship into Helsinki will see...

We then made a stop at the strangely named Pii Poo Lego Story.  The name comes from a character in an old Finnish fairy tale.

We had a quick look around the Lego sets, but Cameron was on a mission. He'd recently got a few different sets and wanted to set up a diorama.  He'd used a program called BrickLink Studio (https://www.bricklink.com/v3/studio/download.page) to plan out what he wanted to build, and it had created a list of the pieces he needed.  Pii Poo had two large bins of miscellaneous Lego bricks so the whole family got involved hunting for the pieced he needed.  It was €10 for a bag of loose bricks and he managed to get about 80% of the pieces he needed (it did take us about an hour to find them but we had fun digging in the tubs.)

By the time we finished up it was time to check into our hotel, so we drive out and took our gear upstairs to the apartment. We sorted everything out as we needed to have a smaller subset of gear to take to Tallinn as we were not taking the car and didn't want to lug everything with us. We also did a few loads of washing and bought some supplies for the weekend.

For our second day we caught the Metro back into Helsinki. It was pretty cold (-8 degrees C, but with a decent windchill).  Our first stop was the Helsinki markets, but they were pretty disappointing because of the weather - only three stalls were set up.

Market square also housed the Keisarinnankivi (Stone of the Empress), which is the oldest public monument in Helsinki. It commemorates the first visit of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, who was the wife of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I in1833.  The monument marks the spot where the couple disembarked their ship.  The double headed eagle on top is the symbol of Imperial Russia with the coat of arms of Finland on its chest. The Latin inscription reads "To the Empress Alexandra, who visited the capital of Finland for the first time on 29 May, 10 June 1833".

The original eagle and inscription were destroyed after the Russian revolution, but reinstated in 1971.

The harbour had begun to freeze over and it was fun to watch the ferry to Suomenlinna break its way through the slush.

Our next stop was just up the road, the Uspenski Cathedral, an Eastern Orthodox cathedral consecrated in 1868.

and then the very impressive Helsingin Tuomiokirkko the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran cathedral of Helsinki built in 1852.

To give an idea of size, this is Cameron walking up the steps

Cameron's view looking down from the steps

We then headed to a shopping centre to warm up and get some lunch.  We couldn't find something we all agreed on, so we ended up heading over to Helsinki Central Station:

The tracks were laid in 1860 and the building was made in 1919. It is famous for its clock tower (see the top pic) and the Lyhdynkantajat (The Lantern Bearers) statues.

After lunch we took a bit more of a walk around Helsinki, including stopping at the Temppeliaukion kirkko (Helsinki Rock Church), which is a copper domed church carved out of the stone. Unfortunately the roof was completely covered in snow, so it just looked like a pile of rocks.

We also came across some cool buildings and street art:

We then returned to the apartment pretty early to finalise out packing.  Tomorrow we have an early ferry to Tallinn, where we will spend the next three days. We will then return for a night in Helsinki before taking the ferry back to Stockholm and driving home to Malmo.  5 days left of this leg of the holiday. We then have a week in Malmo as a family, before Kris and the kids return home. I follow them a week later and we start preparing for the move over here.