Further enquiries or if you prefer an inquiry into the park bench/bed scenario previously mentioned has revealed a basic flaw, Finland is the ONLY country in Europe where the number of homeless people has declined in recent years. Apparently the Finns don’t like people being homeless so if you are caught napping in the park you are likely to be scooped up and given a nice place to live. While this may be fine for people wishing to stay in Finland it may put pressure on your holiday schedule. I’m thinking the high tax on alcohol serves three purposes:

1. No drunks.
2. No drunks sleeping in the park.
3. No drunks from other countries sleeping in the park.

The side effect to this is that there are now more drunks from other countries, sleeping on park benches in nearby countries like Estonia where alcohol is much cheaper and they don’t mind the odd Hobo or two.  Speaking of Hobos the term which technically means a travelling worker could come from the description of a farm hand or hoe boy or maybe homeward bound or even homeless boy. Bill Bryson suggested the railway greeting “Ho, beau!”. Fascinating just fascinating.

So to the pictures.

We started with the Harbour Cruise.

Helsinki from the bay.

Below, we checked out the 30 tonne stainless steel workshop scrap bin sculpture.

Steel pipes and the odd head.

Then to the Finnish museum which “traces Finnland’s history from the stone age”. The museum is housed in a re-purposed church, and seeing as the museum is more scientific than religious in it’s explanation of life the universe and so on, this is a bold move. As the following painting in the Christianity exhibition points out, “judgement day” is pending. I suspect that the curators and yours truly are in the lower half of the painting.

That’s probably me, forth from the left.

Barbie scores a mention with a special display, yet another reason for the curators to be in the lower part of the painting.

“Grown Up” Ken and Barbie going to re-live their youth.

No museum is complete without a few skeletons.

Returning to town we considered dining here, but not for long. The prices looked a bit elevated.

To conclude, three more bronze castings.

“Seal spitting at nude”

“A realy bad hair day”

“early submariner”

We are off to Copenhagen tomorrow so I’ll just pop up to the ninth floor for a  quick sauna. I hope you enjoyed the pictures because, “That’s the Finnish”. I just had to say that.

FIN!

If you are planning a cheap holiday to Helsinki I have collected a few tips during the day that you can keep in mind.

1. Be prepared to cut down on your eating, or shop sensibly. Getting a cheeseburger from MacDonald’s for example and cutting into 3 will give you a full day of calories without the worry of excess (or any for that matter) nutrition. The cost will still be around $10 Au.

2. Avoid expensive tours. By missing the more expensive tourist spots you can save a tidy sum. Try visiting the park for example. The cost for that will be free.

3. Accommodation is another problematic area in Helsinki, so try to look for low cost options. Places with less comfortable beds and no air conditioning are invariably more affordable.

4. Stop drinking alcohol and stick to water. However keep in mind that sudden changes in lifestyle can be dangerous health wise and from a mental well being standpoint a sudden reduction of alcohol in the bloodstream could result in all sorts of hitherto unknown things happening like, well you know um……. forget it let’s just say the risk is just too high and leave it at that!

So in summation forget the hamburger and buy a cheap bottle of wine with the money you saved, take it to the park and spend a quiet day looking at the bird life (Finnish Buzzards and the like) get good and liquered up and when the wine is gone select a nice park bench, not comfortable or air conditioned, but think of the money you saved not to mention the mental health benefits :-).

Suomenlinna is an 18th-century sea fortress and nature area with centuries-old artillery and defensive walls, spread across 6 linked islands.

Panorama.

Cobbled Streets

Still a little light behind the eyes.

Storage Bunkers.

Beach Pffffttt.

Bird of some sort.

Back in town.

Railway Station.

My usual from of transport.

The Boss’s House.

The Boss’s Hat

By the way, while alcohol is expensive here it seems the cost of living is similar to Sydney. Helsinki rates 41st most expensive in the world Sydney comes in at 42. The most expensive is Caracas, Venezuela.

If you go to Russia and someone tells you to visit Peterhof to see the Summer Palace do yourself a favour and don’t bother. An estimated 7000 tourists trying to be squeezed through the human equivalent of a cattle crush is not a pleasant experience. Short tempered guides and aggressive, stony faced babushkas barking “next room, next room” is to use Garry’s description “purgatory”. As lovely as the place is forget the inside and explore the incredible gardens. The way to visit Peterfof is to catch the Hydrofoil from St. Petersburg, step straight into the garden, admire the grounds, architecture and fountains, forget the inside you will see very little and queue forever. If you think you can queue jump on an organised tour, forget that also, it seems everyone is on an organised tour so you just queue in groups.

Enough complaining, pictures.

The reason the queues are so long at Peterhof is the total absence of logical organisation. In the interests of transparency and for the good of all concerned I am publishing a very good likeness of the responsible entity.

By the way, back in town and on the way to the dreaded gift shop, we chanced upon a Russian Gaz Volga ( that’s a car by the way) this is the model car the Sabur family gifted to the Estonian relatives and precipitated this whole excursion. The car was parked in front of a “hand made” shoe shop (that’s the shoes not the shop, though the shop was probably hand made also) so we stopped for photos, to cut a long story short we were soon driving around St. Petersburg in an early 1960’s Gas Volga, windows down, radio playing god knows what kind of “latest funky tunes”. Our gracious driver spoke no English and we spoke no Russian so we communicated by “car”, I showed him a picture of our MG he showed me a picture of his Mustang then it went Landcruiser, Jaguar, Mustang and so forth followed by much backslapping and laughing. Much better than queuing at palaces.

The Volga.

Our new friend lets call him “Boris”, that’s a friendly name.

Boris and Volga.

After four days…..Jen finally managed a tour bus/tourist free Nicholas One Statue picture.

Following our visit to “Kate’s House” Jen and Kerry went to the Street Art Exhibition in one of  St. Petersburg’s lesser palaces while Garry and I supported a beer vending facility in the local park which up until our visit was suffering from poor turnover and dwindling profits. Things are looking up for them now however.

Some of the art,

In the evening we spent a very entertaining two hours at the Nikolayevsky Palace watching Russian Folk Dancing accompanied by traditional music. Photography unfortunately was not allowed. Drinking complimentary Russian Vodka, champagne and eating canapés however was permitted so we weren’t to distressed.

Entry to Nikolayevsky Palace.

On the walk home Jen took more pictures, including ex KGB Babushka now selling balloons on a street corner…. a bit of a come down.

By the way did you pick ‘The Face” in the street art pictures.

“The morning was cold and lonely

City lights old and grey

The tourists all had phones on sticks

They kept on clicking away

Hey St. Peter before you ring you’re bell

Could you send all these painful tourists down to tourist hell”

Apologies to Harry Vander and George Young but Hey St.Peter has been playing in my head for two days and I needed to vent my hatred of selfie sticks again somehow. Great song by the way.

Selfie sticks are evolving they now have motor driven swivel heads and telescopic extension so the would be documentary maker can pan and zoom their way through everyone else’s holiday. It’s very annoying when you are surveying a 200 year old painting and a smart phone elevates itself into your field of view, zooms in and flashes in your face. I’m confident it wont be too long before they come with a boom microphone and mini clapper board.

Me at the Louvre take 7, and action…… ” This is Me walking into The Louvre to look at the paintings………..cut, cut …did someone just walk into frame then?”

Me at the Louvre take 8, and action….“this is Me walking into The Louvre to look at the pictures.. I mean paintings, damit….cut cut, can someone check he teleprompter?”

Me at the Louvre Take 9, and acti…… Hang on hang on, is that a glossy patch there on my cheek, Bob does that look glossy to you? It is isn’t it……Make up!

Today Pushkin and Catherine Palace.

The  Catherine Palace museum covers the 300-year history of this outstanding building and presents the work of architects involved in its construction and decoration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Almost totally destroyed by the Nazis it has taken till now to restore 32 of the 58 rooms destroyed, including the recently restored Amber Room (no photos allowed).

Dining Room

A section of ceiling

Pushkin, Russia’s Shakespeare? Maybe.

The Party Room.

The Garden

View from The Garden.

Guest House.

Bath House

The Amber Room

The Amber room lined and decorated with amber, the original Amber room was looted by the Germans during WW2. In 2003, after decades of work by Russian craftsmen and donations from Germany, the reconstructed Amber Room was inaugurated at the Catherine Palace.

I started thinking about The Cold War, that led me to the break up of the Soviet Union and in turn to the rusting Russian nuclear fleet (that now officially has no owner) this led me to consider  the current sanctions against Russia particularly by the US. Then I considered the 19 trillion dollar US debt, the rise of China as the worlds supermarket, the oil crisis, Korea, The Middle East, India, Pakisan etc. etc. As I spiralled into this mind numbing consideration of this list of ever increasing social and economic potential disasters I reached the the inescapable conclusion, we have way to many megalomaniacs. But you already knew that.

Sankt Peterburg, to use the correct name, was established by Peter the Great in honour of his patron saint and from day one he was determined to make it a show piece. To use a previous pun….. Czech!

After a whole day of touring a fraction of the available optic delights we have gone into art overload, so you will have to sort the pictures out for yourselves or wait for the book. You could be waiting a long time though.

JUST IN  CASE YOU THOUGHT WE HAD RUN OUT OF BEER OPTIONS.

By the way, Peter the Great named the city Sankt-Peterburg (with no “s”), World War One saw the name changed to Petrograd (to get rid of the German “burg”), in 1924 it became Leningrad (for Lenin) and in 1991 back to Sankt-Peterburg. The locals call it Piter.

Mercedes Benz, Audi, Porsche, Jaguar, Lotus, Range Rover, and the odd nineteen sixties Lada 1200. Can this really be Russia, it can if it’s Saint Petersburg.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s game changing economic reform and democratisation, “perestroika” and “glasnost”, certainly saved Russia from economic and social calamity. This is particularly noticeable in Russia’s show piece, Saint Petersburg. It’s taking time to repair the economic damage of  communist policies and cold war economic waste, county areas and industrial precincts still parade the scars of earlier times with antiquated farm machinery run down buildings and obsolete vehicles and these may never recover as more and more goods are imported.

Gorbachev -“We were well on the way to a civil war and I wanted to avoid that”.

Our reduced number of “Avstraiyet turisty” will, with the help of our “turisticheskiy gid” discover some of the revitalised “Sankt-Peterburg”. But that’s tomorrow.

This way to the museum.

Country bus.

City Building, The Admiralty.

The Watchful eye of the law.

Typical locals out for a stroll.

Hopefully not typical locals.

Au Pont Rouge, Art Nouveau Masterpiece.

Glasnost at work?

We leave for St. Petersburg tomorrow and if the KGB have dropped the ball on the “looking into the foreign tourists blog sites directive (specification 2,346a)”, they may even let me in. Maybe I should have a backup plan?

“By the way, I would like to say I think  the Russians are a lovely bunch of people, they have great philosophies, an excellent outlook on life and world politics.  I’m sure Donald Trump won the election without their help. As for the nerve gas incident… Russian people would never use such tactics, that’s just a western capitalist beat up that will be seen for what it is with the passage of time. As for the Estonian thing, new evidence may suggest that it was in fact a liberation and not a cold blooded act of domination of a less powerful country as previously suggested by others who may have accessed this blog site without my knowledge or consent.”

BEING AS HOW IT’S MY BIRTHDAJI MUM TOOK ME TO THE MUSEUMM OF TECNOLOGICAUMNOPS TODAY AND TOOK SOME PICTURIIS. AND IT WAS FUNN!

Any way some pictures of ungrateful Estonia before we leave.

BREAKFAST BUNCH SANS GARRY “THE PHOTOGRAPHER”

Breakfast Venue.

The lift me up in the air thing.

Monkey boy on the push bike looking for peanuts. Yes that is me up there.

Astronaut training for monkey.

paint cannon!

Some sort of weird virtual reality thing.

My mum gets grumpy if I interrupt her morning cuppa.

By the way today might have been all about me, however thanks to Lyndal and Sam for putting up with the pensioners. See you in Australliaapoodcoop. 🙂

Second only to Tallinn in the city stakes Tartu is considered the intellectual centre of Estonia. Located here are: The University of Tartu, The Estonian National Museum, The Supreme Court of Estonia and being the birthplace of beer brewing in Estonia, the location of the A. Le Coq Beer Museum. So much culture in one spot!

Tartu seems to like street art.

The Estonian National Museum holds the complete history of Estonia from the stone age. The Russian occupation is not forgotten nor should it be.

The Museum Entrance.

The Home of Skype.

The Baltic Chain

Estonian jewelery

Letters from escapees.

The faceless revolving and rotating 19th century Estonian zombies were a bit scary!

Finally not to be outdone by Vegas…..

OH NOOOOO! THE HOUSE IS UPSIDE DOWN!!!

By the way back in 1510 the tradition of using a tree at Christmas began. Christmas tree experts are unsure as to the exact location however the smart money seems to be on Estonia.