Back to the real world - Helsinki, Finland

To mangle a quote from Tolstoy, all developed countries are pretty much the same, whereas all undeveloped countries are undeveloped (and a bit hopeless) in their own special way.

This was first and foremost in my mind as we cleared customs in our seats on the train from St Petersburg to Helsinki. Yet again it was a case of what a difference a border makes and for the first time in months we were now somewhere that looked somewhat similar to life as we know it.

Russia had been good to us. It was still a bit soviet at times and the wildly skewed costs of certain goods and services boggled the mind ($100 a night for a crappy hostel room with a shared bathroom, $10 for half a kilo of big caviar) but overall we'd had a great time and seen some truly spectacular things:

• Red Square - it was just like my imagination had decided it should be like
• The Hermitage - we actually got a bit bored looking at priceless painting after priceless painting, but there was some other really cool things like rooms where world changing events took place
• The Moscow Metro - these guys know how to build a train station. The subway stations are amazing, with many rivalling museums for their architectural skill and artistry. Being commies, the Moscow city fathers in the 30's decided that the workers should be able to enjoy the cultural highlights of modern Russia whilst on the way to work.

But it was still not quite right. Perhaps it was just the men going to work in business casual suits with socks and sandals, the falling apart look of St Petersburg's suburbs or the conviction of certain tour guides when they tell you that you'd be crazy to talk to a policeman in Russia, but you could just tell that while these guys are doing better than, say, your average Kyrgyz man in the street in Bishkek, Russia didn't have it all figured out yet.

The Finns, on the other hand, have. Whatever "it" is, they have worked it out, made it look good, surrounded it with a nice park and placed a statue next to it. Aside from the obvious stuff such as real prices (in euros! oh no), trams and shops for all the people selling goods (as opposed the junk, which we had seen quite a bit of) there was an obvious feel of prosperity to Helsinki, my impression of which that was no doubt fed by our stay at the 4 star Hotel Torni which was superb.

It's not like they had it easy either. Finland itself was only declared independent from Russia in 1917, which was followed promptly by a civil war (commies vs good guys and strangely for this area the good guys won!) and then a couple of wars against invading bad guys, namely the Nazi's and the Soviets. After the war the Finns, having very little aid from the West due to a couple of treaties signed with the Soviet Union, developed from a agrarian society to an industrialised economy. The US did provide aid on the sly to prevent communist overthrow of the democratic government, but most of their development was through trade, probably reindeer hides to begin with, but these days it's all about Formula 1 drivers and mobile phones.

Helsinki itself is great, located right on the Baltic sea with many lakes, rivers and islands. The architecture is really nice with most of the city built during the 1920's to 1950's in a nice and tasteful way. There's plenty of grand old buildings and statues and an excellent little tourist market they run each day down by the harbour where a lady sells baked potatoes out of one of those black kettle "Victorian Baked Potato" cookers that used to be at every holiday destination of my childhood. They were never as good as this one though, as the Helsinki version was piled high with smoked salmon and doused liberally in either a blue cheese or tartare sauce. Yummo.


There's a really cool old fortress on an island guarding the bay called Suomenlinna which was built by the Swedes in the late 18th century to ward off the pesky Russians, who periodically invaded. Unfortunately for the Swede's Helsinki fell to Russians for good only 6 months after they completed the fortress so now it sits up there with the 17" guns at East Point in Darwin as expensive, ultimately pointless military installations that now make excellent tourist attractions. We had a good time walking around the old walls and drinking "the best filtered coffee in the world", as proclaimed by a tourist magazine we got for free. We also ate some Reindeer burgers, went and saw the Batman movie and generally had a great time.

It was great to be back in the first world too, as we could drink the water out of the tap and eat ANYTHING! In fact it was the perfect way to finish off our holiday and move on the next bit of our adventure - getting jobs and going back to real life. How sad.