the ferry from tallinn to helsinki is only about 2 hours on a very large and luxurious ship that has several restaurants ranging from pizza/burgers up thru white table cloth with great views - some of us went to the cafeteria in the price range in between those 2 - alcohol in finland is very heavily taxed so the duty free shop - which also carries candy, perfume, etc. just as in an airport - was extremely popular with some people filling up large shopping carts with beer (we were told later they were probably stocking up for a wedding) - for some reason i was in there when the ship started up its engines causing all the bottles to clink together in a very scandinavian-sounding symphony (actually i learned on this trip that finland is not considered scandinavia because its language is not in the same family as swedish danish etc. - in fact as far as i could tell the only language finnish might have anything in common with might be klingon - it has SIXTEEN noun cases and our wonderful guide Maria, who is Spanish and married a Finn and moved to Helsinki 22 years ago, still cannot write a business letter in Finnish and relies on English for that kind of communication)
helsinki is a pretty cool (in many senses) city and has a lot of very interesting architecture (eero saarinen, who designed our really terrible women's dormitory at Penn, was a product of a finnish architecture family altho his father moved them to america when he was very young and he had to re-learn finnish (!!) when he came back as a young man) - kind of a combination of art deco with very robust northern european stone figures - cheap thrills (1 of the few inexpensive things in finland) was riding the 3T tram, which makes a figure 8 circuit of the city in about an hour - interesting to check out the people getting on and off - as expected, lots of gorgeous blonds of both sexes but also a sprinkling of middle eastern and african families
i took the opportunity of being in finland for maybe the only time in my life to do a private sauna at the hotel - very very luxurious - had to give the hotel almost 1 hour advance notice to get the sauna heated up - first comes a living room with a sofa, TV, table with an alarm clock - then a grooming area with lots of towels, lotions, shaving gel, cotton pads for taking off makeup, etc. - then a shower area with 3 open showers (i.e. you can share with friends if you feel comfortable showering together) and a bucket and ladle plus a faucet for filling the bucket - i filled mine about 1/2 way and brought it and the ladle (wooden handle) into the sauna - i found out why they leave it in the shower area as even the wooden handle was VERY hot when i used it partway thru the hour - i also brought my camera in there and it turned into molten metal - also i brought a paperback book and the spine's glue dried out so the pages starting coming away from the spine
i luxuriated in the lovely hot dry heat for a while and then went to the shower to dowse myself with cold water - i did this 3-4 times and screamed each time - at the end of the hour i did feel pretty good and apparently was glowing and looked extremely relaxed - the hotel didn't give my any instruction on the sauna because i suppose that would be like showing an american teenager how to use a telephone
we left helsinki after 2 days to get to the true goal of the journey for most of us - ST. PETERSBURG
