or, moreover, Porvoo, which is a small town about 50 km outside of Helsinki and is known because it has a good portion of old wooden buildings at its center. but i'm getting slightly ahead of myself.
POR VOUS? do you want a postcard? if you haven't already asked for one, now is the time to order one! it will be delivered straight to your doorstep, no payment necessary! all you need to do is let me know!
i started the day earlier than yesterday with the intention of going to Porvoo. after eating breakfast (mmm... banana, OJ, Alpen with milk), i headed off to the bus station. after some confusion as to which bus station, i ended up getting on the bus that never showed up... er.. i got on the bus that left 15 minutes after the one that i wanted to take didn't show up. after an hour and a half on the bus, i arrived in Porvoo and walked into the Old Town.
(all these old european towns and cities have "Old Towns", if you haven't already sensed that pattern.)
the Old Town felt a little like Cape Cod, because it was a lot of wood houses and sheds lining a river. up the hill just off the river is a nice big cathedral that i checked out, the cathedral which Tsar Alexander II attended upon granting Finland autonomy in the early 1800's. Porvoo is known because it has produced many famous Finnish artists of various forms - J.L. Runeberg, Finland's most famous poet; his son, W. Runeberg, a famous sculptor; V. Vallgren, another famous sculptor; and Albert Edelfelt, Finland's favorite painter.. there were others who came and went too.
upon arriving in Old Town, i searched out a small cafe and had a cappucino and a Runeberg tart, which was more or less a cylinder of honey cake with some ligonberry jam on top. after that, i walked all around the town - up to the cathedral, down to the river, across the river, along the river, back to the Town Hall square (where the cafe was) and into the Vallgren-Edelfelt museum. i love Vallgren's sculptures and Edelfelt, it turns out, is not my favorite Finnish painter. unfortunately, the museum only had a modicum of information in English, which surprised me immensely since i think a larger percentage of this country speaks English fluently than in the U.S. after that museum, i went to the Town Hall which is now a history museum dedicated to Porvoo. again, it was all in Swedish and Finnish. it was actually kinda nice, because i breezed through both museums in record time!
after that, i messed around Porvoo for about 30 minutes, walking to J.L. Runeberg's house but not touring the interior. why not? because i wanted to get back to Helsinki in time to actually see the Atheneum Museum of Finnish Art.
and i did. the museum has a special exhibition right now on Silho and Greta Sipila, a pair (in a wedlock sense) of Finnish painters from the late 1800's/early 1900's. their art is great and thankfully came at a time when realism was being washed away - i'm not a tremendous realism fan, obviously.
upstairs are the permanent exhibits of Finnish art and, as always, the art that impressed me the most... heh heh... was the work from the Impressionist era, even though they didn't refer to it as that here. to note, my favorite Finnish artist (and possibly favorite artist - not sure, though, because Monet is hard to top in my book) is A. Gallen-Kallela.
after the Atheneum closed, i went to the National Museum of Finland only to suffer burnout. the only display i made it through was random items from 20th-century Finnish life - including toys from my childhood (He-Man, NES, etc.) and a film reel composed of a lot of miscellaneous footage of events in Finland over the past century. it was interesting. but i couldn't do the rest of the museum, as i said, because i was burnt out.
i had dinner in a tractor-themed finnish restaurant. yeah, weird. the interior was like a barn, almost. and it's in central helsinki. i had a delicious salmon and cream soup, some baltic sea herring and the restaurants home brew to drink. it was a good meal. and now i'm here, but the library is about to close thus the ending of this update is
Posted by iain at August 23, 2005 08:51 PM