Cruisin' to St. Petersburg

---

Second "Fun Day at Sea"!

What a relief to sleep in as long as we wanted and not have to worry about a wake-up call! On one of our excursion mornings we'd had to be called at 4:30 am. (Guess who got the joy of getting up first to shower. It certainly wasn't the MALE portion of the pair of us) And add to the pleasure this morning, we got to set our watches back an hour. Such luxury! That was a great start to a fun day at sea.

I'm now going to try and backtrack a little to describe Helsinki. We had our first "Fun Day at Sea" between Berlin and Helsinki. We encountered some rough weather but were rewarded with a rainbow which we were able to enjoy for about 30 minutes. A second rainbow appeared as well. The pictures I took weren't the best but I'll share one with you.

We were greeted when we disembarked from the ship at Helsinki not by a tour guide but by chilly wet weather and a huge tent-like building with souvenir shops inside. The Finns were very happy to see us. There was a large welcome sign outside of the building and the sign also advertised free wi-fi. I tried the wi-fi..nada!

We and the others on our tour finally located the bus on the other side of the souvenir building. We ran into this problem many places...although our printed directions said our tour guide would be waiting for us with a sign, we had to go searching, sometimes quite a far distance, to find our guide and bus.

There wasn't much to our tour of Helsinki. I guess the tour companies couldn't find much to show us there. A lot of the offered tours went outside of Helsinki to Porvoo, as did ours. We did see the very impressive Helsinki Cathedral. It is large (of course) and white and to get into it we had to walk up a million steps. Well, it wasn't a million, but it felt like it. After making it to the top with screaming thigh muscles, we went in and found that it was very plain inside, as we were warned, despite it being ornate on the outside. What it did have was a magnificent organ. I'll share the picture I took with you.

We also drove by the Uspenski Orthodox Cathedral which had an entirely different look than the Helsinki Cathedral. It has a red brick facade so it looks much darker.

The most interesting church I've visited has been the Temppeliaukio Church, or "Rock" Church. It is so nicknamed because it is literally built in natural bedrock which form the walls. The church has very good acoustics and is used for concerts as well as religious services. The pictures I took aren't good...too many people to try to dodge. I took a picture of the organ and you can see some of the wall and window.

We then took a bus ride on to Porvoo which is a popular tourist town...small and quaint. We saw the Porvoo Cathedral and the old town hall.

Of course every place we took a break from the bus were many souvenir shops that must have been in cahoots with the tour company. (That was true everywhere.) We held off until we were dropped off at the ship and had to run the gauntlet of shops in the welcome building (now a farewell building) to get to our gangway. We were cold and wet, and all of the furs and hats and gloves and sweaters were very tempting until we looked at the prices.

We were lucky and our cabin faced the pier because as we left a couple of women waved scarves and shouted "good-bye" and "come back" as we sailed out of the harbor. If nothing else, the Finns were very friendly.

That was Helsinki. Another city, another blog to follow.

Carol

---

Comments

[MK]

Finland
Chad would have loved the Rock Church I bet! It made me smile that you were able to take away that the Finns are friendly! :) Even better are the rainbows! Love you!