Expatiperro

After three exhausting weeks of travel around Russia, with the constant sensory shocks of being in a place completely unfamiliar and alien, we needed a break. Luckily for us, our final destination on our train journey, Helsinki, proved to be the best possibly place to chill out, get things done that we needed to get done, and enjoy being in an ordered, relaxed, non-adrenal-gland-draining environment.

Helsinki might be the world's cutest city, a small town that somehow also manages to be a completely unpretentious capital of a first world, developed country. Tress line nearly every street, almost matching the heights of the buildings around them, which are all under 10 stories tall. Trams carry people (and tourists, as one of the tram lines also serves as a type of "tourist bus") around the city, coexisting peacefully with cars. The Baltic Sea and its inlets give Helsinki its unique form, and from almost any point in th city you can see the water. Like St. Petersburg, there's no sense of hurry, just a casual, calming mood that imbues the city and its inhabitants.

Our chill-out time was helped by our foray into a different kind of accommodation: Couchsurfing. For the uninitiated, CS is a community of people who offer up their apartments without charge for travelers to stay in, in exchange for good conversation, cultural interchange, and the opportunity to make new friends from around the world. Our host, Ville, was a fantastic host, letting us sleep on his floor, telling us the best places to go, and engaging in some great conversation with us.

The two days that we spent there didn't leave us with a lot of time to explore every nook and cranny of the city (and the pouring rain on our first full day didn't help, either), but luckily Helsinki is a small enough place that it isn't took hard to see most of the major sites in just that small amount of time. Samples (from Kyle's camera) are below.

Russian Orthodox Church

On Suomelinna Island.