A quiet day in Helsinki

My room at the Hilton Strand looks over the water.  So I was quite surprised when I opened the curtains late in the morning to see people walking around and not a drop of water to be seen.  Then I realised that it was frozen.  A perfect opportunity to walk on water!!!  So out I tentatively went and then wandered over to the fishermen to take a photo.  They make holes in the ice with large hand drills (the drills are about as high as a person), then sit and fish.  It didn't look like they'd caught anything yet.  As I left the ice, a family arrived with sleds and some kind of snow-scooter.  Oh to be 8 years old again.

I hadn't learnt much about Finland history so the National Museum of Finland was first on the agenda for the day.  It spans prehistoric time to the present, but I find pre-history rather dull (people lived like cavemen everywhere) so walked through that part very quickly.  Then it skips to the middle ages (I don't know what happened to the thousands of years of history in between - or maybe I just missed that).  Finland was 'Christianised' by Sweden at the beginning of the middle ages and stayed part of the Swedish empire until the early 1800s when it was ceded to Russia as part of some plan by Napoleon to isolate England.  It became a Grand Duchy of Russia and began to establish a bit of its own culture.  It wasn't until 1917 that it declared independence from Russia.  Interestingly, the United States was one of the last countries to recognise its independence (after Sweden and Russia).  The exhibits from the 20th century are basically about pop culture and that's the same everywhere pretty much.  So all in all I was a bit disappointed.  Because there isn't much national history, the museum focusses on furniture, religious artefacts, clothing and a section on Sami culture.  These are pretty boring when they're not part of a bigger story.

I'm not a fan of military history - the battle of this, General that - but I have studied the world wars from the perspectives of a number of countries and I'm always interested to see where the countries I visit fit in.  I think that was part of my disappointment with Sweden, they were neutral in both.  There was nothing on the wars in the national museum and I wasn't up to visiting the war memorial museum, so I googled instead.  Finland was part of Russia during WW1 and so has no story to tell, but it makes up for it in WW2.

Russian invaded Finland on a pretext (as part of an agreement with Nazi Germany) and took a significant part of land.  Whilst other European countries were sympathetic, none provided military aid.  So they turned to the Nazis who assisted Finland in ejecting the Russians from their country.  Great Britain then declared war on Finland.  Which all seems a bit unfair really.  German troops stayed in Finland for most of the war, until Russia attacked again and as part of the peace treaty demanded that German troops be expelled from Finland.  So then the Finns had to go to war with the Germans (who were mostly in Lapland).  As they retreated, the Germans burned everything so there is now very few buildings in northern Finland from before the war.  Finland had to pay significant reparations to Russia.  This also seems a bit unfair - Russia invaded Finland and then got reparations as well.

Ok, enough with the history lesson.  I headed for the market after the national museum but it was closed so I had a blini at Kappeli instead.  Kappeli is an old restaurant/bar/cafe where artists used to hang out (every city has one).  Blinis are a Russian dish - a pancake with beer as the main ingredient.  I had mine with gherkin, sour cream, red onion, mushroom salad and a beer on the side.  Which the waitress poured into a wine glass.