A day in Helsinki

I arrived at Helsinki a bit too early to go straight to the airport, so I had time for a spot of grocery shopping, before picking up my Gallic friends at the airport (and of course my darling, ah what a sweet reunion!). Which allowed us to have a nice introductory Finnish lunch for our friends Julie and Aurelien (salmon, carelien pirogue with egg butter, yummie).

After that, we headed out to explore Helsinki. The first stop on our tour was Temppeliaukion kirkko, or rather appriopriately, Church of the Rock, as it's called in English, apparently. The design was chosen based on a competition in 1961, but the Suomalainen brothers weren't able to complete the church until 1969. It really is quite an unusual church, basically the interior was excavated and built directly into the rock. Light is mostly of the natural kind, bathing the interior through the roof. I like it, one of the coolest and most unusual churches I've seen anywhere, to be sure!

From there we carried on to a place that's always a big success with foreign visitors - Seurasaari. It's an island, directly accessible from the mainland, and a pretty nice one at that. The main draw (apart from a nudist beach, which might interest some folks!) is an outdoors museum featuring countryside houses from various parts of Finland.

Before visiting, we had a quick coffee at a quickly little cafe called Cafe Angelica. It's a bit like visiting an old, posh home, rather than a proper cafe. There is some coffee and some home-made cakes on the menu. We were rather charmed by the place (I was a bit surprised by all the negative reviews on Tripadvisor!).

After our sweet break, we headed off to explore Seurasaari. We started off by walking around the outdoors museum, always a cool thing to do. The place was sort of closing, and we didn't get an entry ticket for visiting the actual buildings, but we still got to see most of the old houses from the outside. As I mentioned before, the other highlight of Seurasaari are the squirrels. And we managed to find quite a few - there's a kind of feeding spot for squirrels, so I suppose it could be called cheating .... ;-)

We had a bit of time to explore Helsinki before dinner, so we had a walk around the classic sights in downtown Helsinki. I took our guests down Esplanaadi to Kauppatori, from where we headed to nearby Senaatintori. We compensated all this energy-sipping tourist activity by having a beer at Bryggeri Helsinki, a micro-brewery conveniently located just next to Senaatintori. Microbreweries seem to be the latest craze in Finland, excellent news if you ask me!

For dinner, I'd managed to book a table at a real Helsinki institution - Sea Horse, also known as Sikala (loosely translated as "Pig House" - apparently due to how their customers - mostly sailors - used to behave ;-). The guests are somewhat more civilized these days - or so we thought! Sea Horse serves classic Finnish dishes like "muikut" (baltic herring), reindeer, or what I had - ognon steak (there is meat, too, don't worry!). All in a decor that could be out of an Aki Kaurismaki movie (very retro).

The food was pretty good, but the best was yet to come - turns out one of the customers was none other than legendary Finnish rocker Andy McCoy (of Hanoi Rocks fame)! Apparently he comes here nearly evey night of the week, and even plays a piece or two, when he's sober enough ;-). Thankfully, Aurelien insisted on us having our picture taken with us, so we did, and even had a chat with the chap. So what's he like in real life - exactly the same as he's in interviews!

What better way to end a great day in Helsinki than meeting one of Finland's living legends, eh?