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Published: August 2nd 2012
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After the long drive through Finland this was thought of as a resting day where we can prepare for our planned trip to Tallinn the next day and our return to the US the following day. After waking up the first thing we do is a quick stop at the nearby supermarket to buy different provisions including Karelian pastry for breakfast. And then it's out to stroll through downtown Helsinki and take a closer look at the many and expensive stores.
First stop was the old church close to our hotel that we could visit only from the outside as there was a wedding inside. Continuing down the Bulevardi we arrived at the Stockmann department store, one of the major stores in downtown Helsinki. Went inside and took a look at the products on offer which were basically anything that you could want. After strolling a bit more we decided to try a cafe in Helsinki and stopped at the first we found a Robert's Coffee place which had quite good coffee - we even bought some coffee beans for ourselves afterwards. Then given that it started raining we entered a large bookstore nearby - it had quite a few
English books on a wide variety of topics.
After this and after the rain had passed we strolled down the Promenade passing the Havis Amanda Fountain which was really popular with the tourists, visited again the covered market (Kauppahalli) and then took a look in the ferry terminal from which we were supposed to be departing the next day trying to gather any additional info that we might have missed.
Then we moved on to the Kauppatori where we bought a platter of fish food from a merchant who was already packing up so we got a discount at least. When moving towards our bench we got attacked by gulls that were trying to make us to drop the food, it felt like we are in a Hitchcock movie. We won our battle and kept the platter almost untouched but the next people were not that lucky so the gulls had a lot of food that afternoon.
Next stop on our walk was the Uspenski Cathedral built during the time that Russia was ruling over Finland - very beautiful both outside and inside. When close to the cathedral we felt almost like in Russia as there was
a lot of Russian spoken nearby due to the busloads of Russians visiting the site.
Starting to return to the hotel we detoured to the Senate Square with the imposing Cathedral - we could not visit it though as it was closed already. Very expansive square with the oldest stone house in Helsinki in one corner which now houses a city museum.
On the way back we started noticing also little details like many street names having an animal picture next to them - no idea why though. Another thing that we noticed was that there were lines in the street with the latin names of plants on them - again a mystery to us what they were marking or celebrating. Quite a few houses also had nice embellishments that we stopped to admire.
Arriving at the hotel we prepared the mushrooms that we picked the previous day and ate them as dinner before watching TV which had quite good travel shows and gave us a few ideas for future trips 😊.
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