Helsinki, Finland

We were slow to wake up this morning, from the jet lag and fighting off a wannabe cold, plus the weather was a bit gloomier.

We made it down for breakfast about 9:30. We were able to eat before they shut down the buffet promptly at 10am.

Walked to the waterfront, the same path as yesterday, to catch the ferry to Suomenlinna, an old sea fortress and now a UNESCO site.

There was a bit of drizzle as we arrived (later the sun broke through and it turned into a really nice day).

Suomenlinna is surrounded by 6km of trails, so we started at one end and worked our way back to the ferry.

The farthest site is King’s Gate, near the old cannons guarding the south end of the island. It took us forever to find the gate itself, we walked through numerous passages and walls and dead ends. There were lots of signs pointing in the gate’s general direction, but it wasn’t clearly marked.

We also stopped into a couple a interesting museums - a submarine museum, inside an actual WWII sub (our favourite of the day), and a customs museum.

Walked back towards the ferry and called into a restaurant for lunch. It only had a buffet, so walked over to a craft brewery place near the ferry. There were a couple large groups, so it took a long time for our food to arrive.

After lunch we walked back to see some more stuff, including the Suomenlinna church and the military museum.

We were fading, so grabbed a coffee. It wasn’t our day for food orders as they forgot about our order and it took a while to get our coffee.

We caught the ferry back to the mainland. While we were at the waterfront, walked over to Viking Lines to buy our tickets for the ferry to Tallinn tomorrow (we also found we’ve been pronouncing the city incorrectly, it’s ‘taleen‘) (later in Estonia, we then realized that 'taleen' is the Finnish pronunciation, we had been pronouncing it correctly).

By now it was almost 5pm, not nearly enough time to go to Kiasma, the modern art gallery. Instead we called into the Sinebrychoff Art Museum, a private collection just down the street from our hotel. The highlight for me was Rembrandt’s Monk Reading. The museum also had a temporary exhibition on the introduction of blue pigment into art (I hadn’t realized, but it wasn’t until the 1800’s that artificial blue became widely available to artists).

We originally planned to use the sauna in our room again, but found the heat from yesterday’s sauna bad for curly hair. Heather had to add a lot of extra conditioner to rehydrate her hair this morning!

We had dinner at Juuri, recommended by just about every blog we read. I was pretty hungry, so we had the 5-course tasting menu.

I can’t remember everything we ate. Started off taking pics of each course, but forgot about half way through. It was a lot of food. The first two courses were three tapas each (called sapas here). Each sapa was the equivalent of a tasting course, so it was almost like we were having nine courses!

The food ranged from very good to excellent (we loved the pickled herring as well as the dessert), although nothing was outstanding. The only miss for us was the chicken breast (one of two mains), but maybe that’s because we get such great chicken from our butcher at home (so that any other chicken tastes bland and/or rubbery).

Chatted a bit with the neighbouring table. They sounded like foodies too, and are also going to Tallinn after Helsinki, so maybe we’ll run into them at another restaurant, on the culinary version of the gringo trail :)