Friday, July 27 – Seurasaari

So today, we went off to Seurasaari, which is another island, but, unlike Suomenlinna, you get to it with a bridge (and a 40 minute bus ride), not a ferry. 

As a whole, it’s a pretty large island, known as the “people’s park” (or something like that, I forget the actual phrase). Basically, its been a government owned, park type place for a really long time. Most of it is just forest and beach (lots of people swimming) and then there’s an open air museum.

Since we were there before the museum opened, we started by walking around the entire island, and pausing in pretty places. It’s gorgeous. Finnish-Americans are always talking about how much more beautiful  Finland is, and, yeah, I saw it in Helsinki, but this, this was just amazing. Trees and lakes and meadows and rocks, all on one island!

The walk actually took about an hour and a half, it’s a large island. And then we came back to civilization, which, of course, we recognized because there was a phone booth.

So, the open air museum part of the island is basically the history of Finland in houses from all over the country. There was an entire farm (like 6ish buildings including sauna) that was transported all the way from Central Finland! There was a cowherd’s house, which looked like a pretty decent place to live for a cowherd a few hundred years ago. 

Oooh! The barn. So there was a barn near the church. Apparently, farm families would keep a barn near the church (which was generally far away from the town). They housed their animals there, but they also used the upstairs to change (so they didn’t look like a mess in church) and spend the night, if they had to. Isn’t that clever?

There was also a manor with a pool table and a corner store and a Russian-style house (which was super-dark) and a funny, unlabelled house with columns. Moomin especially enjoyed pretending to be Little My in the children’s room.

I had a Karelian pastry for lunch, which was scary because the vegetarian-status of the thing was unclear until it was all in my stomach (it was vegetarian), but it was actually really good – eggs and rice and pastry, so basically all my favourite foods (except berries) in one meal.

I spent the afternoon being responsible, researched hostels (yes, leaving Helsinki soon, yikes!), activated my rail pass, looked up timetables for trains and busses, all very convoluted and responsible and boring, but I did get strawberries again! So, at the end of the day, life is worth it, as long as there are strawberries.