We’ve hit the ground running on our 2023 Scandì Adventure! This trip started as a business trip for Dan to Sweden but we’re starting with a long weekend in Finland. We landed in Helsinki on Friday morning. What a cool and welcoming airport! While there are handy trains and buses ready to bring you into the city center, we opted for a taxi ride to get right to our place, Glo Art Hotel, in the Kamppi area of Helsinki City Center. This place welcomed us warmly with its lovely vaulted and painted brick interior spaces and Finnish hospitality. We set up our room and headed out. This is our way.

The hotel is amazingly well located…near the central station (which is super cool with grand deco features), and the Esplanadi, a lovely narrow park that led us to one area of the waterfront, with several embassies and City Hall. I was intrigued by the fact there were two American flags and two EU flags on the City Hall building. Turns out, we were there while A. Blinken was making a significant speech there about Finland’s recently acquired NATO membership.

Our first order of business was a late lunch, so we headed to the must see Vanha Kauppahalli, Helsinki’s oldest market hall built of beautiful brick in 1889.

Here we discovered Soup and More, where we had truly life affirming soup. Their house bouillabaisse is to die for. And I don’t even particularly care for bouillabaisse. This stuff was different. And transformative. With this magic elixir to fuel us, we got on with the business of checking out the other must see spots. We headed east over a canal to the Russian designed Finnish Orthodox church, the Uspenskin Katedraali.

Helsinki’s Most Iconic Churches

Rich in iconography, it was reminiscent of other Orthodox churches like those in Greece. Weather was starting to look a little iffy so we kept to our plans and headed towards the big cathedral located on one end of Senate Square. It’s located up impressive steps and covered in Masonic symbols. Inside, we were fortunate to catch the end of a wedding rehearsal with organ accompaniment. When we came out, the rain caught us and we took a slightly drenching walk towards Esplanadi. Like many trips before, we ended up buying an umbrella because we thought we had packed one but alas, had not. Then time for a coffee and dessert at the historic Cafe Esplanad.

Finns Gonna Sauna

While back at the hotel for a break before dinner, I looked into a sauna booking and the only time available was 9pm. Figuring that was a good way to keep ourselves up to beat the jet lag, we took it. After an early and fabulous Korean meal practically next door to our hotel, we made our way to another part of the seafront and the Loyly Helsinki, a seaside sauna. Kinda fancy and probably not super authentic like the ones workaday Finns use, but seemed like a pretty good deal for 23 € each, and the views and setting were amazing. There were varying degrees of hotness in the 4 public saunas we tried and to cool off, you were encouraged to jump on into the Baltic Sea. I did not, but I did step ankle deep into that water and it was actually nice for just my feet, even though it felt a little like stepping into a slushee. Dan, on the other hand, went all the way in 3 times. No one else let go of the ladder but some did go down to neck level. Feeling like we had probably pulled all the plane travel toxins from our bodies, we stumbled on home to Glo Art and a real night of sleep. Day 1….check.