Slept in….had no scheduled tour and we
were so tired…ached everywhere. Got up about 8 a.m., dressed, ate breakfast and
headed down to find a HoHo bus. Easy to
do…right inside the terminal door…40 euros and takes a credit card…so we bought
our tickets and went outside the other end of the little terminal to wait. Well,
Celebrity cruiseship, Silouette, has been stalking us ever since we left
Copenhagen and they docked after we did in a different dock/different terminal
and across a little inlet of the bay.
It just so happens that the HOHO bus stop there is #6…ours was #7. Yep, they picked up there first and by the
time they got around to our stop, the buses were packed full. He (the HOHO guy) assured us he’d sent
another bus to come straight to us. Well, in a short time, we did get on…mostly
full, but we found a seat right up front.
And took a tour of Helsinki.
There wasn’t a lot that made a huge
impression on either of us. The port
area was ugly . The city was nice but
nothing that struck me—and I’m sure that our feelings were due largely to what
we’d just left in St. Petersburg.
Helsinki is hailed as the “Daughter of
the Baltic” and has modern architecture and lots of parks. It has 160,000 people and is certainly small
compared to St. Petersburg or any of the other Scandanavian countries we’ve
visited. It does date back to the
period of Tsarist rule in 1809 afater political control of Finland passed from
Sweden to Russia. Finland gained its
independence in 1917.
It was Mother’s Day and nearly
everything was closed. There were a few
little shops in the terminal building…some very high-end furs and then some
typical souvenirs, but no pins to stick on caps. Ronnie’s collected one from every city/port that we’ve visited
except Portugal—forgot it there. But
none of these shops had them…..all kinds of magnets—no pins. We’ll have to go to Ebay.
It was a fairly short trip around the
city. Nothing we wanted to hop off to
see. So we got back to ship, ate lunch
and came back to sort thru 400 + pictures of St. Petersburg. Thank goodness for digital photos…
Tomorrow we have another tour scheduled
with Alla Tours for Stockholm. We dock
in Nynashamn and have to tender in. I
know all the Princess tours will have first shot at the tenders and it will
take a while for us to get to one. But
we are supposed to meet the tour guide at 8 a.m. so we may be a little
stressed, as usual, at the procedures to let people off. It’s still worth it, tho, to take a smaller
tour with less people. I just
could not handle another tour on a big
bus—ever again. We could weave our way
in and out of the masses of people yesterday with much better ease than the
huge buses.
Helsinki scenes:
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