Thursday, May 04, 2023

Day 7 - Suomenlinna

sunset doesn't last all evening
a mind can blow those clouds away
after all this, my love is up and must be leaving
All Things Must Pass - George Harrison

I first heard of that song when watching The Beatles: Get Back documentary series. George Harrison was playing part of the song and no one thought much of it, it was like in a passing, and I was like wait hold on, it's a really good song. I was glad when I found out later that he did record the song. After watching that series, I think my favorite Beatles is George Harrison :) Anyways, this is the last post about the trip. My flight out of Iceland was in the morning, so I had to wake up early to pack my stuff. My pick-up to the airport was at 06:00 AM so I left the hotel a few minutes before that to walk to the bus stop. I remember thinking that while it's cold, it's surprisingly not that cold that morning so maybe Iceland had started to warm up for the spring and summer. By the way, next to the hotel there's a pharmacy and even though it's closed for the day, it's always brightly lit inside which I found to be strange, but one of the guide did tell me that electricity is cheap in Iceland. It's one of the things that's not affected by inflation. It's because their electricty is mostly generated by geothermal energy and it's renewable. It's very interesting how life can be the same everywhere you go and at the same time can be completely different too. I grew up with parents and family members who'll be like, why are you switching all the lights or why you never turn off this and that or you all use too much electricity - now imagine being in a place where such notion never occurs :D Back to the trip - the ride to to the airport was uneventful. The bus driver to the airport did ask to show ticket but he didn't really check. I guess the check came from the person picking you from your stop to the bus station, because he's the one with the list of people. The bus driver did refuse to start driving when he saw one passenger refusing to put on seat belt due to some issue, a stand-off ensued, but luckily the passenger in the end relented. At the airport, there was practically no queue when I dropped off my luggage but there was quite a queue for security check. My flight to Helsinki this time was on Finnair. Like Icelandair there's no free meal but unlike Icelandair where each seat has its own entertainment system, Finnair has none of those, sigh. I spent the flight listening to my own music and looking out of the window. Iceland was mostly white all over from the sky.

Arriving back in Helsinki, I pretty much knew my way around. That sense of lightness when you can just get off a plane and walk out of an airport without having to bother about luggage or what have you is just so wonderful :D It's only on a few occassions I got to do this and I really like it. First order of business was to get some water but then I was quite hungry, so I then decided to sit down and have salmon soup. The serving was big and not bad, but halfway through it I thought it was really salty. I wonder if the people in this part of the world just have a saltier taste? Because I noticed the same in Iceland. I managed to finish the soup and then it's off to the train station to get my ticket. Looking out of the train window, it was a blue sky day but snow was still on the ground. The plan for that day was to visit Suomenlinna which is this small island or what Google would tell you, a sea fortress, just 15-minute ferry ride away from Helsinki. When I got off the train in Helsinki and started to walk to make my way to the ferry, I realized that I was slower than I expected so I couldn't make it for the ferry that I thought I could get and instead I took the 17:40 ferry. It was cold out and I didn't feel like walking around outside so when I saw people waiting inside, I followed suit. Generally, there's a ferry to and from Suomenlinna every 20 minutes, but it's depending on the hour. There are some hours where it's only one ferry per hour so check the schedule if you plan to visit. The zone ABC ticket that I bought for the train could be used for this ferry too and of course I scheduled it so that it fell within the 90 minutes. The ferry wasn't full and there were obvious other tourists like me. You can actually could go up to the second level of the ferry to really see the view, but it's cold out and no one was doing it, so all of us just sat inside. It's really cold and I'm sure it's gonna be windy, so even if there's someone doing it, I'm not sure I would. This photo below was taken from inside the ferry, so that's why there's that weird glare thingy. I'm not sure if it's part of Suomenlinna.

On arriving in Suomenlinna, my first order of business was going to the toilet so I entered a building which I think was the visitor center. That day being a Sunday, whatever service they had for the day was done. No matter, the toilet was accessible and I was most thankful for that. The taps in the sinks have notice that the water are safe to drink and people are encouraged to try it. By the way, many things are closed on Sundays in Finland and even if they're open, they close early too like maybe by 5 pm. I kinda forget that this kinda thing happens in Europe. That Sunday apparently Finland was having Parliamentary election too. Anyways, I guess when I arrived in Somenlinna though the sun was still out, it was already quite late so it's quiet which I think made for a good visit. For a while I just followed the direction of where the other tourists were walking but along the way I found myself alone on the path. So I just followed the map that I had downloaded. There are people living in Suomenlinna which I don't know if it's a good idea or not. The good thing is that you have nice nature around you. The bad thing is that, you really need to schedule your life around the ferry to so-called go back to "civilization" and there will be times where there are just many tourists? During my trip there, I didn't really see people who I thought was resident. It is possible that most of them live on the other part of the island where it's not touristy. Looking at the map, there are actually 4 islands. The 2 biggest island are where the tourist attractions are. Nothing was written for the 2 smaller islands and those 2 smaller island are connected by a bridge each. To cater for the tourists, Suomenlinna actually has quite a few interesting places. They do have cafes and restaurants, none of them were open when I was there. Again because it was late on a Sunday. Maybe they open longer in the summers. There are also museums which were already closed when I was there. I wasn't interested to go to any of them anyway. My whole purpose for being there was just to spend time walking around it was quite good. The end point for the walk as guided by the map was to reach the King's Gate (last picture below). To reach the gate, there was one section of path overlooking the water below and on the path there were some cannons lined up. You could actually go down the path to the beach but it was cold and I didn't feel like going up and down stairs.

The only thing that caused me a bit of concerns and the concerns came from me projecting things rather than reality was that there were these big groups of teens who were doing I think extra-curricular activities? I don't know if they camped there; it must be awfully cold if they did. Though I think they are teens like maybe 15-17 years old, they're all are taller and bigger than me. They wore like a prison jumpsuit either in white or black with a lot of badges being put it. It felt a bit militaristic and them being all white and blond - again it's me projecting things, I want to stress this point - I was wondering if they are in some kind of far-right, QAnon, and white supremacy group thing which as an Asian walking there alone, there were quite a number of times when they were around, I was like please God don't let them be crazy. I left one area quite fast where there were quite a number of them congregating. Maybe it's nothing like that at all, maybe it's just some harmless teenagers nature group thing, and I was just being paranoid. I get all my international news from CNN and I guess even reading CNN could make me look at white people differently. So anyways, after reaching the King's Gate, I started to make my way back slowly and there's still some things that I didn't notice previously like this submarine below which actually already appeared in one of the picture above. I just didn't notice it then. The submarine is called Vesikko and you could actually enter it, but it's only open in the summer.

As the sun was setting, I really liked how the colours are changing. It made the top red branches red. There's also a pinkish reddish tinge on the clouds. It was getting really really cold and I was just ready to go by that time. Real life isn't great but I was okay and ready for vacation to be over and maybe that's a good thing.

I took the 20:20 ferry off from Suomenlinna. This time around, the ferry was quite full including a group of those teenagers. My flight was actually leaving at 01:25 AM so I still actually had a lot of time to spend. I did think if maybe I should go to the cinema that I found and watch John Wick, but then I thought maybe not because the ticket price was also more expensive than Singapore. So I walked slowly back to the train station taking pictures along the way and passing the Esplanadi park again. It was kinda late, so not many people around.

There was a shop along the along the way that had the Moomins display on its window. I didn't get any Moomins related thing on this trip :( There's actually also a Moomins cafe at the airport but by the time I was there it was already closed for the day :(

Remembering the 90 minutes on the ticket, I decided to just head back to the airport. During the train ride, the train stopped for some time. After awhile of us not moving, I decided to ask the lady in front of me what's happening, but I don't think she spoke English or maybe not well that when she tried to find the words, she just couldn't so I said it's okay. I wasn't worried about time because I had a lot of time and we did start to move again, so it's all good. I wasn't that hungry upon reaching the airport but I thought I should eat and settled on Burger King when I heard Indonesian being spoken. I purposely sat next to the guys who spoke them and asked them in Indonesian if I could use the chair near them for my bag. I was really very curious with them, seeing them sorting out boarding passes and luggage tags. There were 4 of them and they are tour guides. They had 90 guests in total and the next day they were off to Paris. So late that night the 4 of them went to the airport to self-check in all their guests and print all the boarding passes and lugagge tags so that they could just drop off bags and breeze through the next morning. As much as I like travelling and seeing new places, I know I don't have the patience to be a tour guide and seeing them late that night, I do think it's one hard aspect of their work that maybe people do not see. We all talked a bit and then I left them to their work and after walking the one shop that still opened, I decided to just go to the departure area. It was quiet at that time. I might be the only one who was passing through immigration and security at the time when I was doing it. I was quite tired. So when I found a sitting area with soothing nature sound and nature projection on the walls, I just literally lied down and at some point I even lifted my feet up. I personally do not think that is proper behaviour but I was really tired, my feet was tired from all the walk in this whole trip. It was still quite a long wait at the airport and I was just really tired and it took effort to be somewhat alert. I wasn't looking forward to being in a full plane but luckily it turned out my seat on the plane wasn't bad. I chose aisle (always on long flight) and no one was sitting in the middle and the lady sitting by the window didn't have any seat in front of her so she had direct access to get out to the toilet. I dozed off a lot during this flight, in fact also during the Singapore - Helsinki flight that I didn't watch many movies during both flights. I am seriously getting old now that I couldn't stay up much anymore. Alright, let me end here. For pictures from Helsinki, you can go here and for Suomenlinna, you can go here.

:) eKa @ 9:49:00 PM •