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Published: July 18th 2007
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You Never Really Know A Country Until You Get Out Of Town
We’ve been really sad over the last few weeks that we have been relegated to only major cities. Since our time in France we have jumped from one big city to another. While this is a great way to get an overview of country’s culture, it gives you no feeling for what a country is actually like. Most cities, despite having large/important sights, temper their country’s culture with a dose of cosmopolitan-ness (not a word, but you get the point). This means that most people in cities are not necessarily typical of the country’s people as a whole. In order to round out your perspective you must get out of cities and see a small town.
We had purposely planned a day more than we needed in Helsinki in order to give us a chance to do just that, head into the country. Our destination for the day was Porvoo, a small town about 50 km from Helsinki. This tiny town from the 13th century was situated on the main travel route through Scandinavia which started in Bergen, Norway and ended in St. Petersburg.
At the time there was no town in Helsinki and the capital of Finland was in Turku about 200km away. The vast distance gave Porvoo an edge because it was perfectly placed as a night time rest stop for travelers.
Today Porvoo is pretty much still a small town. The middle part of town has been modernized but the main attraction, along the river, is the seemingly untouched Old Town (it’s actually not really untouched, more rebuilt after a couple of attacks by Russians and a few town fires). The town, with its distinctive red ocher shore houses, was a hub of trade between northern Finland and the rest of Europe. Goods were transported through here and stored for future travel either up the river for use by Finns or to be put on ships and sent across the Baltic to Tallin, Estonia for shipment into central Europe.
The town’s big economy builder today is tourism. People from all over the world come to Porvoo on tour busses. Thankfully for us, we didn’t run into many of these huge groups of travelers who are eager to consume sights in as little time as possible. With the exception of
Finnish Peas
These are a great treat and much sweeter than what we get at home. A real Finnish speciality. one Japanese group (they are everywhere) we remained unhindered by tours.
A Day Trip For You to Porvoo We took a bus from downtown Helsinki to Porvoo. The trip took about an hour due to a few stops along the way to pick up other passengers. Once off the bus we started walking through town using the suggested path that the tourist information center in Helsinki had given us. But, before we got far, we noticed another market, similar to the one in downtown Helsinki only much smaller. We stopped to ask a produce shop owner about something that we had seen people eating all over Market Square in Helsinki. Turns out that locals love these relatively large pea pods with fresh raw peas inside. These Finnish delights are only available during the summer months and are eaten by the kilo.
The lady behind the produce stall showed us how to eat them and gave us one to taste. We were immediately hooked on peas. You basically open the pod by pulling the skin back at its seam. Then you just pull out these extra sweet peas and eat them raw. I can tell you
that I’m not much of a pea fan, but between the two of us, Kel and I polished off a bag of these veggies in no time.
As we walked around town, snacking on peas, we were both amazed by how beautiful the day was. Travel is one of those activities that is really impacted by weather. Whether you want to or not, you opinion of a place is very much formulated by the time you’ve had there. When traveling, the time you have in a place is almost always a function of the weather. During our time in Porvoo, it was sunny with just a hint of clouds. The wind was light to medium and the temperature was just about 75 degrees. Perfect!! You couldn’t ask for a better day to walk around and enjoy any place.
After walking around about half of the town we decided to get lunch. We had read in our brochure that there was a restaurant in town that specialized in locally farmed snails. Kel and I are both big fans of escargot, so we were really excited to see what a snail restaurant had in store for us. We each started
Finnish Peas
These are a great treat and much sweeter than what we get at home. A real Finnish speciality. with escargot, garlic for me and Roquefort for Kel. Being the sharing people that we are, we both had three of each. Our main courses weren’t as interesting, I had fish while Kel had ox, basically a steak. Over all the meal was really good but the key part was the escargot. We could have stopped after the escargot, the rest was just something to round out the meal.
We did have one interesting, very Porvoo item for dessert. We split a Runeberg cake; this tall cylindrical corn cake soaked in sweet sauce is named after Porvoo’s most famous resident, Johan Ludvig Runeberg. Runeberg was Finland’s national poet in the mid 1800’s and wrote Finland’s national anthem. If you are ever in the area, check out Runeberg’s statue in the middle of town, but choose to eat a Runeberg cake at your own risk, we found it dry and not incredibly tasty.
The rest of the afternoon we walked around town until we found ourselves on the very northern edge of the old town. Just north of town is a small lagoon which is surrounded by an absolutely gorgeous meadow of wild flowers. Our pictures really just don’t
Porvoo Harbor
Photo By: Kelley Turner capture the beauty of this part of Porvoo. We walked around for about half an hour and enjoyed nature at its finest.
After our thorough wandering through Porvoo we made our way back to the bus station to catch the next bus back to Porvoo. On the way to the station we stopped and bought more pea-pods to enjoy on our way home. Instead of eating peas on the way back, we both fell asleep and slept through most of the journey back to Helsinki.
Since we would be leaving the next day to move on to Oslo, Norway we decided to play it pretty cool during the evening. We ate in the hotel’s restaurant and hung around the room so that I could work on this blog entry and later watched some TV before calling it a day.
Hope everyone back home is happy and healthy! We miss you all!
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lee
non-member comment
Wow
Gorgeous landscape shots, wow!