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Helsinki is a classic European city but with much higher prices, sadly I hear it is one of the cheapest Scandinavian countries. I stayed at the Olympic Stadium Hostel though. It was actually inside the Olympic Stadium from 1952 or some year. Now they just play soccer games on all of the fields at the stadium. I got off the boat with no info on the location, but I figured that if it was in or near the stadium it would not be too difficult. The first night I was told that Pub 99 was where I should go, sadly the 99 must have stood for the average age of the people in the place, I quickly left. Then I went to some Olympic themed bar near the hostel and it had the Russia vs Germany hockey game on tv. This was the last thing that I wanted to see and decided to have one beer and pretend that I drank so much that I couldn't remember what happened.
I didn't have a guide book or anything for Finland considering I wasn't even planning on going to Scandinavia so I just looked on someones travel blog for whatever they did
and I tried to do the same thing. So when I was looking around I found this interesting information that I will plagiarize and since I am not longer in an academic setting I don't really care. Also I need practice for copyright violations for when I go into China. So here is what Neddy a fellow blogger had to say.
We started our adventures with a trip to Suomenlinna Sveaborg, the spectacularly unsuccessful island fortress designed to protect the city from invasion. Finland used to be a part of Sweden, and it was actually the Swedes that built the fortress. They were afraid of an attack from Russia, who had long had their eye on Sweden. Anyway, they built the fortress with a whole lot of cannons to protect Helsinki from a sea attack. Unfortunately for them, the Russians came by land, and attacked the fortress from behind, lobbing cannon shells from the mainland. Even worse, the cannons on the fortress could not turn 360 degrees toward the mainland and so were useless. Needless to say, the Russians won - apparently without the Swedes firing a single shot. The story of the name is pretty interesting too -
it was built by a Swedish prince and was called Sveaborg (castle of the Swedes). Apparently the Finns had some problems with this, as they have trouble saying their 'b', so they called it Viapori, which is the name the Russians also used. When the Finns declared independence from Russia in the early 1900s, they hit back at the Swedes, calling the fortress Suomenlinna (castle of the Finns). This was a not entirely successful plan as Swedish is also an official language of Finland. So, the fortress is called "Sveaborg" in Swedish and "Suomenlinna" in Finnish and both are official names. Hmmm, seems like the Finns should have made the Swedes call it the Swedish for 'castle of the Finns'.
Now Neddy may be less reliable than Wikipedia for all I know. I don't know where she got this information from, it may have been on the walking tour of the island, but I am not a fan of hanging out and walking with old people and taking two hours to do something when I can do it in one hour so I didn't go on that tour.
I walked around the city looking for interesting buildings to
take pictures of, now most pictures I post I know what they are I am just too lazy to write the name in the caption when I post the photo, but here I really have no idea what the place are for the most part. You have to be careful the sidewalks are very confusing. I've almost been hit by a bike multiple times. After the first time the guy on the bike yelled something at me, and I looked down to see that the side walk was half brick and half pavement. I realized I was on the wrong half. I wanted to say sorry where I'm from we don't walk or bike, but he had already went by. Sometimes though they just have painted pictures of either a person or a bike every 100 yards but they are so worn that I could hardly tell which was which. Then sometimes I guess they just expect you to know. But I did find out what people did with all that beer they took from Estonia. They sit in the park and drink it in groups. This is great you get a few friends and buy a case of beer
and sit in the park then about halfway through you can feel confident enough to start using the Finish pickup lines that were given to you in Prague. You may get a lot of eye rolling, now I haven't translated that into English yet, but I'm expecting big things. Or maybe they aren't into my awesome beard that I'm growing, which you may be able to see in the picture that I had someone take of me so that people would quit acting like I'm still at home and not really traveling since they haven't seen me in any pictures.
The weather was amazing and the city was wonderful. If I had more money I would stay much longer.
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