First staying at an embassy is an interesting experience. This one is a compound with both the embassy proper and the official residence. They are two distinct buildings, but one floor of the residence is a huge reception area, complete with commercial kitchen, where the ambassador can hold official functions. The private floor is a very large apartment. There was enough space devoted to hallways alone to make another apartment. Our friends have a lot of art, especially from their time in Nigeria, which filled the hallway walls. Maybe that's true of most ambassadors, so the apartment may have been designed with that in mind. The buildings were designed by a famous Finnish architect, and are impressive -- lots of light coming in. They are in a gated compound that fronts on the Baltic Sea (with its own boat dock) on a small island called Kuusisaari that is a mix of embassies and private homes that are mostly weekend homes.
Our friends were excellent hosts. I had never been in Finland before, and after this weekend, I feel I know a lot about it. We arrived Saturday morning, and got a driving tour of downtown Helsinki, seeing the most important buildings from outside and walking around the old city. We spent some time at the harbor market, where many diffrent kinds of things were for sale, but that day they seemed to be specializing in preserved fish, mostly herring, I think. Here is a bit of a view of that market, with the Helsinki Skywheel (from which you can sip champagne and which I understand has at least one cabin that is a sauna) and a relatively small (by Helsinki standards) ferry -- it's that three story boat, which is probably just taking people to local islands, not to Estonia or St. Petersburg.
After we returned, we had to try out the embassy's sauna, which was wonderful. They had it at 190F, which is not particularly hot for a Finnish sauna, but certainly had us exhausted after 15 minutes. Wimps that we are, we cooled off with a cool shower, but there was also a cold pool for the adventurous (like the ambassador's husband).
Apparently saunas in the past were used for political discussions and decision making at the highest levels (a house and very large sauna building belonging to an earlier leader of Finland were pointed out to us, and we were told that most of the discussions that led to the current government were carried out in that sauna). However, Finns prefer to sauna in the nude, but that's not done in mixed company, at least outside the family, making it difficult for a female ambassador to make use of this custom (not sure how common women in political power are in Finland. They pride themselves on their egalitarian society, that doesn't seem to extend to full participation of women in the upper levels of business or politics.)
The evenings were spend mostly catching up on each others lives, though a football/soccer game was enjoyed by the others (the ambassador has a German TV connection) one night.
On Sunday we went to a small museum on the island, called the Didrichsen Museum. They have some interesting things in their permanent collection -- Munches, Warhols, Moores, a Picasso -- but we mostly saw items from a South African artist named Lionel Smit. He had both paintings and sculptures, but it was the sculptures that captured my imagination.
Very interesting interaction between abstract and figurative elements. Plus it was a nice walk (we walked all the way around the small island)
Next we went to Hvitträsk. This is a compound some ways outside Helsinki, where three Finnish architects, one of whom was Eliel Saarinen, whom crossword puzzle lovers should know, built houses (in an art deco/arts and crafts/Jugendstil style) for their architectural practice and for their families to live in. Shortly after they moved in, Saarinen's wife left him for another of the architects and Saarinen immediately married the other architect's sister (cold winters make for lots of intrigue, I guess). Here is the part Saarinen built
Monday the ambassador had to go to work (ahh, the joys of being retired), so we wandered around downtown Helsinki. We discovered the way NOT to do sightseeing in Helsinki. All the museums in Helsinki are closed on Mondays (and many on Tuesdays) and the public buildings you would want to see from the outside were almost all covered with scaffolding. But there was still enough to keep us busy for 5 hours or so.
We started with the Rock Church, a protestant church built out of rocks (there are a lot of them lying around in Helsinki) in the 1960s. Here are views of the altar and the organ (the acoustics were fantastic)
It's not obvious from these photos, but the roof is glass supported by the beams that you see. On the cloudy day we were there it was amazingly light-filled.
Another of our stops was at the Sibelius monument, Finland's most famous musician. The monument makes you think of organ pipes. This is the best view I got of it. Yes, that's Jay standing in the middle of it.
The next morning we had to get up at 5:30am to make our flight, and today has been a day of doing laundry (in the world's smallest washer and wimpiest dryer -- possibly the subject of another post) and catching up on email and German homework.
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