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The Tallinn-Helsinki ferry takes three hours to arrive in the Finnish capital. There are many of them and they are very comfortable, and there are also pleasant performances with folk music there.
Finnish sauna and Indian killer
The town center is small: 2 churches, a square and a market where they sell salmon in all sizes and mountains of berries. I really enjoyed the trip to the small island of Suomenlinna. It is located in the bay in front of Helsinki that was the fortress built to defend the city.
Sooner or later I will return to see inside the country the nature that is certainly its strong point. Maybe without taking the Tallin-Helsinki ferry but coming there from Sweden for a road trip, who knows.
However, I was glad I spent a couple of days there and it was very interesting to be hosted by a very kind Finnish woman contacted through couchsurfing.
In her apartment building they had a communal sauna. As luck would have it, the very day I arrived, she was due her weekly hour. We went downstairs in our slippers and bathrobe to go to the basement sauna, show!
Also memorable was the telling of the movie story of when she lived in India and her daring escape. She was married to an Indian hacker and was quite wealthy; although she was young she died suddenly. She would inherit a fortune but within a few days. Aided by the Finnish embassy, which sent a driver in the middle of the night, and taking a couple of paintings with her, she had to flee because she learned that her mother-in-law had paid a hitman to kill her! In India, people’s lives are cheap.
Still Tallinn-Helsinki ferry and the third Latvian in Latvia
I returned by the same ferry and same musical performance to Tallinn and from there took the bus to Riga, the capital of Latvia. At the station my new friend from Rome picked me up.
Both of us had already been booked for months in places where it was not possible to add a guest or convenient to cancel the room, so we took a third room in a bnb. We slept together and then each went to his own hotel to change/dress because we didn’t like the shared bathroom. The first day we walked around Riga, full of art nouveau buildings and went to the market. Featured was a statue of a black cat that a merchant had built on the roof of his house as a bad luck charm against a merchant association that would not accept him. Needless to say, it became a symbol of the city.
Finland is a distinct country and apart from the sea and the fact that many Finns go shopping in the cheaper Tallinn, it has nothing to do with the 3 Baltic republics.
As is my custom, I try never to limit myself to just the capital cities, which are often a world apart from the rest of the country. So on the second day we went to Jurmala, an elegant seaside resort that is very popular with Russians, and took a long walk on the Baltic Sea beach telling each other about past romantic misadventures.
Small and close but different countries
These among them still have signs of the Soviet past and an original medieval heart that is absolutely European, but they differ greatly and in a few days one can make a trip full of different insights. Generalizing one could call Tallin medieval; art nouveau Riga and baroque Vilnius.
In the following months we saw each other a few more times, but then she went back to devoting herself to boyfriends who did not deserve her; however, we are still in touch and it has remained a very loving relationship.
Previous stop Journey to the Baltic countries, Estonia first
Next stop Visiting Vilnius each time new emotions
Trips taken, travel stories divided by continent
Countries visited in my travel stories
Anecdotes, divided by type in travel narratives
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