AussieInFinland

Sunday 28th August, 2011 Paris, France Our hotel balcony near the Place d’Italie looks out over the city skyline, and if I stand at the very edge, and look to the Right, I can see the top half of the Eiffel Tower. As all good tourists in Paris, we went to see it up close yesterday. Us and thousands of others. This was after our visit to the Musee d’Orsay, (8 euros)which has a fantastic collection of art pieces from the impressionists and post-impressionists; Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Sisley, Van gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Delacroix, (in fact anyone who was anyone in the art movement in the late 19th Century) and many more. The gallery is HUGE. The building was ... read more

Wednesday, 24th August, 2011 Vienna, Austria The day was HOT again. For the second day, the temperatures were soaring in the mid thirties Celsius. Today we would not walk, or catch a tram. We’d do all the longer distances by taxi. The first trip took us to the Belvedere Palace, which houses an art collection. Our main goal: to see some works there by Gustav Klimt, the artist who painted ‘the kiss’. The taxi dropped us off at the rear of the gardens of the museum, and we faced a 1000 meter walk to the building through a pleasure garden, full of statues, fountains sphinxes, and a riot of flowers. I noted that each sphinx had a unique woman’s face, gazing serenely at all the visitors, but asking no riddles, except to me they asked: who ... read more

Sunday 21st August, 2011 This morning my sister and I bid farewell to her family and we set off on our Roadtrip. ROADTRIP!!!! YEA!! Visions of Thelma and Louise (only the fun bits) floated in my mind as we set off, two women together to explore unknown territory, temporarily free of all responsibilities. Veenendal being on the eastern side of Holland, we soon crossed over into Germany, leaving the neatly sectioned fields, perfectly straight canals and beautifully manicured verges behind, for a wooded, more relaxed looking countryside with fields not in straight lines and crops placed more haphazardly. It is apparent in even these small details that Germany is less densely populated. We stopped for lunch at a pretty little town near Dusseldorf named Hilden. We chose this town, as our family name is Hilden. Family ... read more

Day 17, Sunday Monday and Tuesday, 7th –9th August, 2011 Helsinki Let’s go shopping!!! A girly afternoon of exploring the centre of Helsinki with another cousin Mia. Lots of other tourists were on the same quest, I heard lots of English, and other languages being spoken around me. We walked past the beautiful Art Deco frontage of the railway station, the entrance flanked by two statue figures with chiselled Nordic features. We wondered along the cobble-stoned (Luckily I didn’t wear high heels for walking in town- I would have done myself an injury) footpaths to Mannerheim street and Alexander street to look in at the many boutiques; lots of little shops featuring handcrafts by various Finnish artists and artisans, inventive and beautiful. We stopped in at Globe Hope, a business which creates goods from recycled materials, ... read more

Thursday, 11th August Tallinn, Estonia. My aunts Eva and Kaija, my cousin Marja and I decided that we would go and see the sights in Tallinn for a day. Tallinn is the capital of Estonia, a mere 80 km from Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland. It still bears some of the signs of the Soviet era, but it is emerging as a vibrant city and a tourist destination because of the old city, where centuries old buildings have been preserved, among which are many tourist shops offering handcrafts, Baltic amber jewellery, restaurants and fashions at prices much better than in Finland. One of the biggest drawcards however are the numerous bottle shops offering huge discounts on alcoholic beverages, which are snapped up and carried across to Finland by eager locals by the suitcase load. The ... read more