Helsinki, Finland - Holland America Westerdam - August 4, 2005

2923-E Olney-Sandy Spring Road Olney, MD  20832 Phone: 301-774-4646 Fax: 301-774-3610

Send Me An Email To Comment Or Book A Vacation mailto:lynx@lynx-travel.com   http://www.lynx-travel.com

         Photo Links        

This was a light day for touring.  After blowing off our wake up call we started to get ready for the day at 8:00 AM.  We went up to the Lido Dining Room and had breakfast.  I’m getting quite fond of a salmon, shrimp and cheese omelet.  We went down to disembark the ship and found we were quite a ways away from the town.  They had a bus taking everyone from the ship to town for $3.00 each way. 

Well this I just finished typing this day up and touched something that completely erased the rest of this day’s journal.  I’m really pissed off right now.  I had less than a paragraph to finish.  So here I go again. 

The drive to town took us to the western end of the Esplanade, which ran down the street seven blocks to the Market Center.  Market Center is an area that has a market going on along as being at the port where ferries and tour boats depart.  

We started walking to the Market Center but we both needed cash.  We checked a couple of exchange booths that had 5% fees for American Express Traveler’s Checks.  We found a bank off the Esplanade and probably would have been better off at the exchange booth.  Matt gave me a hard time for quite a while about that.  The bank ended up across the street from one of the main sites in Helsinki.  The Cathedral of Helsinki was right across the street atop a hill of about 40 stairs.  At the foot of the hill was a huge square that had a statue of Russian Czar Alexander II.  It was a decent sized church and was white with green domes.  The inside was fairly plain but really everything is going to pale in comparison to what we saw in St. Petersburg. 

When we entered the cathedral there was a dance troupe of girls about Erin’s age dancing ballet or some local dance.  Matt was hard on them and had made another snap judgment about who was the best dancer.  I exited a different door than Matt and ran into a couple from Silver Spring who was on the Celebrity Constellation.  I was wearing a University of Maryland t-shirt, which is a magnet for attracting people from home.  I also ran into our dinner tablemates John and Jill.  She was doing pretty well considering she had been on crutches for six weeks.  She was supposed to discard her remaining crutch on Monday but was using it around Helsinki.  I can understand why since I hated walking on all the cobblestone streets in these European cities. 

The cooked food area consisted of a lot of local foods like grilled salmon, salmon paella and white fish.  The white fish was bait fish that had it head cut off and was deep-fried.  The stands all had these huge skillets with mounds of the paella. 

We got an Olvi Beer at a stand that also gave us a sampling of the white fish.  It was really very good.  It resembled a sardine but it didn’t have that salty taste.  After our beer we wandered around and bought some souvenirs then headed up to the other cathedral in this area, The Uspenski Cathedral.  This was on a hill overlooking the Market Center.  We hadn’t seen many hills this trip.  This was a red brick cathedral with green spires.  Again it was a nice little cathedral but it couldn’t stand up to what we’ve seen in St. Petersburg.  The funniest thing we saw at the cathedral was a sign of a schnauzer with a red cross through it.  We couldn’t figure out why the Finnish people were discriminating against the Schnauzer but we were sure it had something to do with a WWII grudge against Germany.   

We headed back towards the Market Center and Matt had seen an area near the water that had a life saving ring and ladder.  He figured it was for drunks who fell in the water.  We wandered around the Esplenade/Market Center area for a while and got a couple of more beers at our stand.  Matt found out the girl working the stand with the nose and tongue ring had lived in Washington, DC.  This was probably why she spoke better English than us. 

It was getting to be about 1:30 PM and we decided we should go see one more sight.  We had to use the bathroom and that ended up costing us .40 Euro each.  We saw our Tennessee friends Tom Newsom and Don Moser with their wives who were headed towards the Market Center.  We gave them a quick rundown of the area.  They had been on a tour and apparently had seen a house that had doors I could not fit into.  That gave them a good laugh.  I guess they will judge everything by my size from now on. 

We boarded the tram to the 1952 Olympic Stadium near the Cathedral of Helsinki.  I miscounted the stops and we got off a couple too early.  As we were looking at our map a crazy old lady came to try and help us.  She just got so flustered trying to explain what we had to do even though we already new.  We needed to go up two more stops.  She asked us about tickets and we didn’t really have an answer so she thought we had either magically appeared at the tram stop or had walked.  She told us we needed to buy a one hour tram ticket at a store but got flustered again when trying to decide which one of two that were across the street from each other to go to.   

We had planned to just jump back on but as we stopped she yelled at us that we had to go to the store to buy our ticket.  We just did after that.  It turned out to be a good move because we met this pretty cool girl behind the counter of the store.  We asked her about tickets and she sold us each one.  When we asked about fines for not having one she said it was 60 Euro but she hadn’t seen a tram cop enforcing that in two years.  Matt was getting parched, I had bought a 1.5-liter coke, and asked, “I can’t take a beer on the tram, can I?” to which the girl responded, “why not we do”.   

I was hoping to find a t-shirt to get for Scotty and Jerry but the best I could do was a couple of programs I saw at a counter.  They didn’t look like they had a price on them so I took a couple.  We needed to start getting back to the bus stop and decided to take another road back to the tram to try and find a store selling t-shirts when we happened upon the crazy lady again. 

I kind of left Matt hanging with her as I ducked into a sports store in search of t-shirts to buy for the boys.  I came outside and Matt was in a deep conversation with the flustered old lady who was trying now to tell Matt which tram to take to circle the city.  Just 15 minutes earlier she was worried we couldn’t get to the Olympic Stadium and back to our bus in 1.5 hours much less take a tour of the city on the tram. 

We got back on the tram and made it back to the bus stop at 3:00 PM and the last tram left at 4:00 PM.  There was the Kafka Café right next to the bus stop so we had another couple of beers.  I splurged for the .5-liter draft beers for my round and Matt got another two .33 litter Olvi.  I complained that I was getting the raw end of the beer buying and Matt countered that I didn’t like the draft anyway. 

Well he paid for his faux pas by insulting some poor girl and feeling terrible about.  He made some type of noise when the less than attractive girl walked by.  In Matt’s mind it sounded like him imitating a pig’s oink.  Apparently the girl looked at him with this sad face and Matt tried to give her a look that the noise was inadvertent and not meant for her.  She kept looking back and he kept explaining his perceived insult which he kept insisting made it look even worse that he was telling me about insulting her.  He really felt bad about this until we got on the bus. 

This is where he could insult someone behind her back.  There was this striking blonde Scandinavian looking girl who apparently was a friend of one of the girls taking our tickets for the bus.  I looked up at her and noticed when she looked left only one eye went left. 

I told this to Matt and he was fascinated that he’d seen a really good-looking girl with a bad glass eye.  He kept asking me to call her to make her look and to take a picture of her.  I gave him a hard time about his weird rules.  It was bad to make a girl feel he had insulted her even though he hadn’t, but it was OK to make fun of the good-looking girl with a glass eye as long as she couldn’t hear him. 

The bus finally left and we hit traffic immediately.  It didn’t help that the first ten minutes were spent making three right hand tours to get us right where we started.  All I could think was we needed Vladimir of St. Petersburg to pull off one of his patented Crazy Ivan moves from the movie “The Hunt for Red October”. 

We finally got back to the ship and boarded.  I’ve spent most of the time writing these journal entries.  Matt’s giving me a hard time on how much I’m writing and if I make him sound good.  I told him the whole thing was about a simple man from the province of Flower Valley who rises up to lead his people to prosperity only to be taken back down to bottom and exiled to the terrible land of Lincoln Park. 

I’ve sent a post card and bought some disembarking pictures too.  The next most exiting thing was having two dinners.  One dinner was at 6:00 PM and one at 7:45 PM at the Lido Dining Room.  The first dinner was a pastrami and Swiss cheese on pumpernickel.  We watched the ship leave port and realized the Market Center wasn’t that far from the ship.  There just was no easy way to get there.  The port of Helsinki looks like a pain to enter and exit due to a bunch of little islands and rocks that are just under the water.

At our second dinner I had a surf and turf of monkfish and sirloin steak.  The steak was really good but Matt and I have decided a lot of that might have to do about the excellent salt they have on this ship. 

Matt finally went down to mail his post cards.  Of course he forgot to mail them on the ship before we left and ended up paying twice as much for Swedish mail than Finnish mail.  He went upstairs to read a book on the barc-a-loungers upstairs.  He really got into the book and never noticed that the lounge filled up with everyone in their tuxedos for the formal night dinner we blew off for the Lido Dining Room.  Finally he spent some time in the casino.  When he came back to the room he explained to me that there was a room on the ship that gave you money and then took it all back. 

Continue To Stockholm, Sweden August 5, 2005

Return To St. Petersburg August 3, 2005