New Year's in Lapland!

Christmas in Europe - Back to Helsinki

After Germany we returned to Finland so Aaron and some visiting from Germany could get a taste for Helsinki. Sure, it would be dark, but everything should be open again so why not revert to playing the tourist role in earnest?

Well, one reason is that I severely underestimated the effect of...dark. While it did make the work week difficult, it doesn't make touristing much of a picnic either. For one thing, many tourist attractions assume no one will come visit them in the pitch black of early afternoon so they choose to close early in the winter. One example was the castle of Hammelinna (above), which we drove an hour to get to. Bummer. The floodlights were nice though, especially when one of our friends used the darkness to relieve himself over the side of the wall. Too bad I was up on the wall as well -- might have made a truly interesting picture from below.

Since our friends had rented a car, we explored the countryside a little more on the way to see Tampere. One stop took us to a sculptor's house on a lake. Again, despite multiple signs posting their opening hours as starting 15 minutes before we arrived, they were in fact still closed. So, we just hiked around the grounds for a while with no one to stop us. Beautiful house and setting...



...and gorgeous setting, right on the water...



...though perhaps modern life intruded a tad into the setting for some of the art work...



Once in Tampere (one of the three largest cities in Finland -- the others being Helsinki and Turku) we had trouble finding much to actually entertain us. The highlight for us was probably the Moomin Museum, celebrating the comics and books of Tove Jansson. Pictures aren't allowed in the museum, which basically just has a number of large collages depicting scenes for various Moomin books. However, there were no regulations against acting out with the Moomin figures on the outside door...



Between walking around Helsinki and driving to Tampere, we had four days of typical tourist experience. We even managed to find our German friends some reindeer (to eat -- not to take home). And despite my many walking tours, I also managed to find new monuments. Such as the "Independence Tree" to celebrate Finland's independence from Russia in 1917.

Unfortunately, though quite a tall tree, it did seem a bit of a letdown for a tree with a name as grandiose as "Independence Tree". Perhaps that is just another indication of the Finnish culture -- modest and somewhat reserved, but still standing tall.

World's most beautiful sentence

I was told by someone at work that a Finnish sentence once won a contest for "world's most beautiful sentence".

The sentence was "Aja hiljaa sillalla" which apparently means "drive quietly on the bridge".

Aside from how cool it would be for there even to be such a contest, I was able to independently verify this little tidbit by finding a similar post on Yahoo! Answers. Therefore, I deem that it must be true.

Christmas in Europe - Berlin

As noted earlier, our Christmas in Berlin unfortunately started with a trip to the emergency room. On the plus side, it could really only get better from there.

Even on arriving in Berlin with crippling stomach pain and the all-over aches of a slowly simmering fever, we couldn't miss the 4-story tall Christmas tree in the train station. According to the guidebook, it was decorated with 40,000 Swarovski crystal ornaments. Unfortunately, the guidebook fails to mention that even pretty and expensive transparent ornaments don't photograph well in daylight, although apparently large corporate logos in windows do just fine.



We also enjoyed the strange German adult fascination with Legos. While not quite as tall, this tree did still have its charms.



Moving on to more meaningful sightseeing, we went to Breitscheidplatz to see the "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche" (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, I think). It combines the ruins of the original church which was bombed in WWII with a new modern octoganol church built on the same site.



Ok, so what I wrote above wasn't strictly true. Yes, there is a memorial church at the square which is a popular tourist destination. However, what drew us to the site might have been the large Christmas market. No, we weren't eating anything (at least, not anything fried in lard) but it's still fun to look.

Look, they're large, pretty, delicious, and fun to eat!



One of the joys of touring a world-class city is that they tend to invest heavily in public art. I really like this sculpture. I don't know if it's because it reminds me of the simple joy of two people being together, if it makes me think of Sesame Street, or if it makes me think back to when I studied karate and watched movies where action heroes would routinely punch their hands into someone's chest and rip out their hearts. Which is kind of what it looks like is going on here.



Of course, not all investments were in "public" art, as noted by the Erotik Museum we happened to walk by. No, really. We particularly liked the rotating "69" sign on top.



Much of the rest of Berlin (or the little we saw while staggering around doped up on painkillers and various stomach-settling medications) was highly grandiose in a style I will now attribute as German. Large, towering, even overwhelming...but frankly not really that attractive. Many buildings or monuments look like good places in which to decide someone's fate or monitor the private activities of millions (a la Big Brother) but they don't really speak to me of interesting cultural attractions.

One such example is the Brandenberg Gate. Built in the late 1700's, it symbolizes peace and has a very interesting history which you can read about on Wikipedia but which I wasn't that interested in as I was looking up at it. Mostly I just craned my neck way back and said, "huh. big."



As another example, see the Reichstag, below. It's the seat of German parliament, and also unfortunately so freakin' huge that I had to slowly step backwards for about a half mile in order to get the whole thing in frame. Barely.



Despite my initial negative attitude, the truth is that there were some large and grandiose monuments with which I could identify. The controversial and expensive Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin was one example. Composed of essentially an entire block of tall stone squares rising out of the cement to different heights, I think it is meant to convey the masses of people who died. It also serves as a maze through which you can walk, sinking slowly deeper as the heights of the blocks around you rise to block out the sun and make you feel very very alone.



The remnant of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz well less effective at evoking feeling. It just looks small and insignificant. Mostly it just serves as a useful backdrop for tourist photos -- like this one!



The cobblestone path running through Berlin conveys the message of the former Berlin Wall much more effectively. It traces out the path of the Wall throughout the city, cutting today's highways and sidewalks in seemingly random places to remind people "what is on the other side of this line might be beyond your reach".



All this talk of memorials and war is depressing. So, I end this entry with a Christmas message kindly delivered by our nifty four-star hotel: a pretty (and fancy! check out the peacock feather) poinsettia which arrives in our room on Christmas Eve.

Clean train bathrooms are important

One of the many things we enjoyed eating at the outdoor Christmas markets in Cologne were these delicious potato pancakes. They were like hash browns deep fried in enormous flat troughs of oil, so the resulting "food" contained a minimum 30% pure fat content (note: I am making up the exact number, but you get the idea). Just in case we wanted to deceive ourselves into thinking that the oil was sliding off the potato pancake back into the frying vat, employees would periodically carve off another chunk of solid white lard from a big bucket and drop it into the vat to melt, presumably replacing all the greasy goodness that was making its way into the potato pancakes and from there, into our stomachs.

I wouldn't describe these 'lard cakes' in so much detail except that I hold them entirely responsible for the crippling stomach infection I came down with on the day we tried to leave Cologne. Sure, Aaron got sick too, but not nearly as badly so this story is all about my misery and pain (sorry, hon).

The key aspect was that the 4.5 hour train ride from Cologne to Berlin is now known as "the worst travel experience of my life". I threw up four times in the first 90 minutes, which is why I cannot stress enough how critically important it is to ensure that there are clean bathrooms on any long train ride when you think you might be really terribly ill. Fortunately, Deutsche Bahn came through for me, but given the misery of the overall ride this was really a small upside.

The remaining three hours of the ride were spent moaning periodically in a fever-induced pain haze (which might have discomfited the other passengers somewhat, but as should be clear from this description, I truly did not give a damn) and wishing that the train would go a lot faster. Though as you can see, it was going pretty darn fast already.



The end of this story is that I ended up in the emergency room at the excellent Charite hospital in Berlin, with an IV jutting out of my arm to provide both saline and some kind of painkiller. Two days later I was able to eat again, which put a dent into our sightseeing plans but did manage to save us a little on the food budget. It's all about the silver linings.