I got to the hotel at 9:30am for breakfast and then hung out for a little while as Diane did a little bit of packing. Our first adventure of the day was heading to the photography and theatre museum. We walked to the central train station where the two of them got day long metro tickets (this became quite important later) and we went west to the end of the metro line.
One building contained three different museums so we started at the top looking at the restaurant and cafe museum. The best exhibit, in my opinion, was the theatre museum. It contained more interactive elements than any other museum of it's size I have seen. The woman who worked there not only encouraged us to participate, she seemed disappointed that none of us wanted to try on costumes and act on the two stages set up for this purpose. We got to mess with a variety of lighting and sound components and appreciate the challenge of being a weather man or woman working in front of a blue screen. All of those things were just fun additions to the scale models of sets which were lovely and I think worth the price of admission. The ground floor of the building contained the photography museum. If I read Finnish, I think I would have gotten more out of the exhibition but there were still two components which I found quite engaging. The first aimed at capturing the world from the perspective of animals and insects. The artist researched the optics of these creatures and developed means to capture photographs in a similar manner. I also was interested in a work meant to think about the generalization of children. A collection of children were photographed and each child appeared twice in a shot - once dressed to look like a boy and once to look like a girl. Depending on the age of the child and how well they acted the part, it was often hard to tell which gender adhered with their physiology.
Right outside of the museum was sitting Tram 8 so we boarded and all dozed a little on the 40 minute ride across town. About 30 minutes in a woman came around asking to see our tickets. Having those passes saved us from deserving an 80 euro ticket per person! Once we arrived at Arabia (which I learned still functions as a production plant in addition to being a school, museum, and containing store) we went up to the museum. Thankfully, the woman in charge let us be there at no cost. It was interesting, but quite small and all Arabia dish ware and sculpture.
On the tram route 6 back to the city centre there is a Martina restaurant which is a Finnish chain where my classmates and I ate twice on our weekend trip to Rovaneimi, so we stopped there for lunch. I was quite surprised by the size of the restaurant - from the outside it looks small but the seating area is in the lower level and quite large. After lunch we went back to the Hotel GLO and played scrabble for awhile. They had an early flight so wanted to get dinner no later than 8pm and get to bed. We walked to Nolla in an attempt to get one more round of salmon before they left Finland but the place was packed and a party was just starting so we went in search of a new location.
Walking through Kampii brought us near the Hotel Torni so I decided an ariel view of the city would be a good ending to their trip. I had thought about it before but wasn't 100% certain I could find the hotel. After pointing out the landmarks we had visited earlier in the week, we decided to go to Fazer for some open faced sandwiches because that was a more Finnish option than the thai restaurants we kept passing. I ate my first salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing along with a quiche that did not seem to contain egg (oddly, I thought). Predictably, the most amazing element of the meal was dessert. We split a chocolate chili cake (best flavor imaginable) and a slice of the Fazer Easter cake (containing carrot cake, mousse, fruit jam, and many other fruit flavored wonderful things). With that and goodbye hugs the tourist part of spring break came to a close - great week!
Saturday I slept in later than I had since being in Helsinki (I did stay up late Friday night making phone calls and video chatting), woke to do laundry, knit, started many a blog, and ate wonderful tex mex leftovers. Such a lazy day. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment