Sleeping a night in a real hotel with real beds (with free wi-fi!) was wonderful,not to mention the fact that we didn’t have to be out the door until 9am!
First stop in the morning was the Helsinki City Center, Helsingfors, which was founded in 1550 by the King of Sweden, Gustav Vasa.
The steps up to the city capital were intentionally built very steep and a very long, this way it imbues a sense of importance and power to your movement. Well, in all of the deep snow (that none of the Nordic countries seem to find appropriate to shovel or plow) these steep steps proved to be hazardous, as can be seen by the fact that some people took to sliding down the handrail as opposed to trying to walk!
We then walked through Helsinki to Kiasma Museum of Modern Art, designed by American architect Steven Holl in 1998.
I’m almost positive that this is the most modern building that we saw the entire trip. Unfortunately, the museum was changing over quite a few exhibits, so I didn’t get to see as much as I would have liked, and I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I would have liked as we were quickly rushed off to Alvar Aalto’s (there he is again) studio in Helsinki, 1954-1955.
The studio was beautiful, and is now being used by the Alvar Aalto society (as far as I could understand from what our very froggy tour guide said).
By the time we left the studio and the streetcar made it to our stop, we were starving. Edward, Shane and I ventured off into the mall/bus station and found a place called “I Heart Food, The Restaurant,” which is obviously where we stopped for lunch.
I ended up getting a three cheese pizza (which I really should have shared with someone) but it was a bit funky because the third cheese was blue cheese. It didn’t quite work with the pizza in my opinion, but it didn’t matter, because the most important part of lunch was….
BEN & JERRY’S! Sweden is comparatively “cheaper” to Denmark, so it seems actually like it was a smart-shopper investment haha. But I made Edward take his outside…and the poor boy is from Tennessee and is freezing all the time anyway, so he was really cold eating ice cream outside!
Then we had a few hours and a list of about 15 places that we “should” see. Obviously, we didn’t see a lot of these things. In fact, we as a “group” only checked off two.
The first was the Rock Church, Temppeliauki, designed 1969 by Timo and Tuomo. The entire thing was built out of / into rock, and it really was quite an amazing building. One of my favorites, and one of the favorites of students on the trip. It is interesting to think about building with rock, especially as we consider issues of sustainability.
Our second stop was Artek design store. The company was founded in 1935 by Alvar and Aino Aalto, Maire Gullichsen and Nils-Gustav Hahl in a effort to promote modern art and a fusion of design and functionality. There were so many great pieces of furniture and other household items, and of course it was fun to play with all of them. What I had to resist so hard to buy, though, was their new unisex perfume/cologne, called “Standard.” It really just smelled a woodshop and new furniture and good things.
After a long day of touring Helsinki, we met up at the highest point in the city, which just so happens to be a bar as well. We enjoyed beer and wine on DIS and enjoyed the view with our friends, went on in the evening to enjoy a dinner on DIS, and crawled happily back to our hotel. I enjoyed my last night in Finland by visiting the sauna in the hotel, took a nice long hot shower, and got some more sleep. I had to be up early in the morning to get breakfast and run into the hotel gift shop and buy my “I Heart Helsinki” t-shirt.
