on boats

 

my dear readers, I shall now embark on the telling of two different adventures that I have had recently, a weekend apart from eachother. except for the fact that they both include boats, they have rather little do to with eachother and should really be in seperate blog posts, but alas.
 

as for the first one, two weekends ago, it so happened that Ayla (the only other person in my chapter here, a truly lovely soul from Germany) was to be accompanying her host family on a steamship on which her hostfather works, and they had room for one more, so she invited me. it was marvelous. the ship (S/S Heinävesi) was from 1906. it left from Savonlinna and took us to an island on lake Saimaa, where there was saunaing, lake-swimming, and musicing. there appear to be quite a lot of songs about Saimaa, as many such were sung that night, in the belly of a steamship over cold, black water and below a black, starry sky.

 





the linna of Savonlinna



 



I found a friend in the cabin we slept in onboard.

one has to watch out for accordions in this country. they seem to appear out of nowhere.

 

Ayla and I on the island.

and now to tell of the second trip. this one was last weekend, during syysloma (autumn vacation), which was friday through monday for our school. we went to Tallinn, Estonia.




the ship's mirrored stairwells with Tuuli

...and Tiina.

our ship left on saturday early evening from Helsinki--a stylish, bustling, wonderland of a city of which I failed to take pictures. we toured a bit of the city and ate lunch at a Fazer café (one hasn't seen chocolate displays until one has seen the windows of this place) before catching our ship. having never been on a cruise ship before, I have to say it was a little overwhelmingly vast.




I think this boat may have been bigger than Tallinn.



Estonian lights!

playing with Baltic rain in the ship's light.

on board was a buffet (at which we ate an unseemly quantity of food), cosmetic, candy/liquor, and souvenir shops, a sauna, at least two discos, and, of course hundreds of sleeping cabins (we slept on the ship at port in Tallinn). one would not have noticed that one was in the Baltic sea if one didn't consciously remind oneself.
 

the café at which we breakfasted is the rightmost building here.



 Tallinn, o, Tallinn! for starters, Estonian is an incredible language that I want to learn. it's like Finnish that has taken its silk off in favor of wool. it actually bears many resemblances to the Karelian dialect of Finnish (spoken in my area).

outside the church.



inside the church.




atop the church.

 

atop the church with Tallinn layed out below.

the city itself will remain in my memory as a cluster of cobblestone streets, old women selling woolen mittens in accented Finnish, and medieval church spires disappearing into the fog. that is, of course, only the old part of the city (vana linna). we spent pretty much our whole time in Tallinn bouncing between vana linna and the shopping centers on its perimeter (goods are cheeper than in Finland, apparently). it's probably a combination of the remarkable lack of crowds, the general cleanliness, and my never having been in a medieval city before, but I had to keep reminding myself that everything I was seeing was real.

Tallinn's got some pretty interesting walls...



...and doorways...

...and layers...



heippa, Tallinn.

another ship by our side on the way back.

 it is truly a magical feeling to walk the deck of a ship using the wind as a crutch, and tell yourself: here I am, with Estonia behind me, Finland ahead of me, Russia somewhere over to my right, and the Baltic sea all around me. nobody was outside (probably because of the cold) and I made several loops of the huge, deserted deck, feeling incredibly small and balanced on top of the world. when we got back to Helsinki, the sun was waiting for us, and by the time we got back to Savitaipale, the clear sky had brought us rime on the grass, which crunched under our feet when äiti and I took Eddie for a walk under the white stars and the black sky and the stripes of silver clouds. this week it feels winter is coming to Savitaipale.




selfportrait in the window of the return ship.