Turku
Our last morning in Tampere was a pack up morning. We double checked that we hadn’t left anything and said good-bye to our glorious hotel room view as we ate the last of the cardamom doughnuts. The rest of the trip would be a return to places we had already seen as we made our way back to Bergen using the same route we had taken to get to Finland. The retracing started with a three hour bus ride from Tampere to Turku. On the way we caught a brief snowstorm which was the only snow of our trip.
The first thing we did in Turku was stop at a kebab shop and order a pizza which we ate while watching a bizarre American real estate program on the shop’s TV. When we were done we left with ambitions of seeing the parts of Turku we had missed the first time we came through just as soon as we figured out where and when to catch the ferry the next morning. At this point things stalled out considerably. We had thought we would just stop at the bus station to look at a schedule but the station, and practically everything else as well, was closed for a national holiday we hadn’t known about. The hotel’s internet was down and the people we asked were clueless. Eventually we figured it out though it though it took such a ridiculously long amount of time that the sun was already setting.
So we set about exploring Turku after sundown. We didn’t really know where we wanted to go but there was a mildly interesting-looking church we had seen from a distance so we decided to make for that. The Turku Cathedral got increasingly more fascinating the closer we got to it. We have a painting of an East Coast barn on the wall in the office at home. The artist made the barn have the history of its additions and re-buildings show in the barn walls with parts of them being stone, then brick. The Turku Cathedral was like that barn painting only on a grand scale. The bottom portion was stone, then brick of one type, then brick from another year. Windows were cemented in or not without a clear pattern. Even though the building was cathedral-sized the resulting effect was much like a small country church, or even barn, that the neighbor’s had loved enough to rebuild after it fell into ruin. The interior was simple, and spacious.
Outside young men were passing in front of the cathedral stairs dressed in suit and tails with top hats. They were holding hands with young women dressed in evening gowns. Everyone going toward a large yellow building at the far side of a cobblestone square. The building was lit up until it seemed to glow. On the outside there were many ground lights around its base, and inside each window had a lit up chandelier. There was a tall wrought iron gate that one needed to pass through to get into the building with two sentries standing guard also in suit and tails and hot hats.
Whatever was going on we didn’t seem to be invited so we moved on to get a quick dinner at a Hessburger (think US Burger King) since almost everywhere else was closed. Then back to the hotel, another Omena, where we watched yet another dog training show a subject the Finns seem to have an endless TV appetite for.
Macho Tex-Mex
Ferry to Stockholm
The alarm woke us at 5:00 AM. We silently packed up and got ready to go. When we got to the bus station the bus arrived promptly as if there never could be any confusion as to its schedule and we said good-bye to Finland as it drove down to the harbor where the ferry was waiting for us.
This ferry was smaller than the one we took earlier. It had blue sky and clouds painted on its exterior. Inside there were many images of Moomin, a cartoon character that the Finns are really really excited about. There were even a few people dressed as Moomin walking around waving to the kids the way Mikey Mouse does at Disneyland. Our having gotten on the kid friendly ferry back to Stockholm didn’t mean that there wasn’t still an awful lot of drinking and underage gambling going on. It just meant that the slot machines had cartoon characters on them. We were wise to the system this time and came as prepared to duty-free shop as everyone else getting enough chocolate to last us the rest of our stay in Bergen.
Vodka section of the duty free store.
"Russian Standard 100"
Vodka in a can.
The sky had been overcast for our first ferry ride so it was nice to have the day be clear on our return trip. I spent almost the entire day sitting by the window staring out at the passing islands wrapped up in my coat, hat, scarf, and long underwear. The ferry was freezing cold. At lunchtime I finally found out what was up with the women we had seen occasionally throughout Stockholm and Finland wearing floor length black velvet skirts over either a hoop skirt or many petticoats and fancy blouses often made out of a gold or silver metallic material by asking the woman at the cash register about them. They were the Finnish Kale or Finnish Romani.
In the evening the ferry pulled into its Stockholm port and we disembarked. The walk from the ferry to Af Champan with all our luggage seemed very long and we were very happy to put it down in the same room the youth hostel had assigned us before. We sat in the windowsills and looked out at the view again for awhile before hunger talked us into going out again to get some dinner.
Stockholm
We had a full day in Stockholm before our red-eye flight back to Bergen in the evening. The morning started with some exhaustion over the question of how to get our bags to the regional bus station where we would need them to be when it was time to catch the shuttle to the airport. Neither the subway nor the city bus system were very convenient for getting us from the youth hostel to the station and we were randomly stubborn on not wanting a cab. Finally we just packed up and started walking. At the station there was some hassle to get the right denominations of Swedish kroner to work the lockers but things straightened themselves out and we were free to start our day.
The Klara Kyrka was close to the bus station so we thought we would make for that and see what there was to eat for breakfast along the way. Klara Kyrka managed to be impressive while also being pretty and sweet. The pillars were painted with a combination of precise geometric shapes and flowers while the ceiling had images of saints inside of circles with wide borders of the same geometric and floral designs. The pipe organ had filigreed wooden turrets on the tops of the pipes which let the organ visually blend into the rest of the church more than most pipe organs do. While we were there a small group of people were holding an offkey sing along with a guitar. While I’m assuming the songs were religious they did sound suspiciously like Swedish versions of campfire songs which was a bit at odds with the elegant decor. Also a bit at odds but interesting was a notable sculpture of a very thin man outside the church.
By the time we left Klara Kyrka we were very hungry. Luckily there was a restaurant a few steps from the church grounds. Paul happily took note of an advertisement for waffles on the restaurant door and ordered some for breakfast. This earned him some very odd looks from the waitress and those around us. Apparently waffles are to be eaten in the early afternoon. After making a point that it might take a little while to warm up the griddle it was decided that waffles before 10:00 was acceptable. When they came they were quite decadent – sugar dusted heart-shaped waffles topped with ice cream, jam, and syrup. We wanted to order another batch but didn’t being rather concerned about the consternation that might cause. Even without another plate of waffles we found reasons to linger at the restaurant. The Kafferepet was an old establishment full of local Stockholmers beginning their day with such a sense of ordinariness that we felt like we were having the privilege to look into a window of realness often denied to tourists.
After breakfast we wandered around Stockholm doing a repeat of our days in the city at the trip’s beginning. We went to Gamla Stan and looked at more tee-shirts saying, “I love my Swedish boyfriend”, key-chains, magnets and postcards of the Prince and Princess, and then to Södermalm where we had lunch at the restaurant with the workman’s daily specials that we ate at our first day in Stockholm. After lunch we came back to Stockholm’s mainland near to the bus station. We walked through NK, Sweden’s version of Stockmann, and saw the Hötorgshallen, an underground version of the Finnish kauppahallis. If we ever live in Stockholm, and the thought has crossed my mind, this is where we would be shopping.
After the Hötorgshallen we went back to the Kafferepet for the last afternoon cup of tea of the trip before going to the bus station, retrieving our luggage and waiting for the regional bus to take us to the airport to wait for a plane to take us back to Bergen.
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