Day 15:Porvoo

Our plan today was to leave Helsinki and look at a town about 50km away. Transport is very easy to negotiate here and it took us no time to find the bus station, which was beneath a shopping mall. Leaving the city behind we immediately noticed a difference in the landscape from the other Baltic countries we had visited which were all very flat. Here the land was undulating with large, dark rock formations seemingly bubbling up through the grass.. It was a stormy day with heavy showers. Not sure whether it was a good idea for a trip out of the town. Maybe we should have found a museum to visit instead. Once we arrived in Porvoo, the heavens opened and we took shelter in a church.

There were one or two interesting things to look at inside the church whilst we waited for the storm to subside.  The present church dates from 1450s. Over the centuries it has been destroyed and rebuilt several times. It became a Cathedral in 1723. The first church built here was around the beginning of the 14th cent.

This is a medieval statue of St Mary donated by a sea captain in 1988. It originates from central Europe from around the 15th century,

The pulpit made in 1764 by craftsmen from Porvoo.

By the time we left the cathedral the rain had eased off and we wandered through the old town with its narrow cobbled streets and wooden houses.

Down by the river are the red painted wooden warehouses. In times gone by ships would come upriver from the sea to unload and load their cargo. The warehouses were used by the merchants to store their goods.

From the riverside you get a good view of the Cathedral.

The old station which I think is being converted into a restaurant.

Completed in 1764 this is the oldest town hall in Finland. Now the building houses the Porvoo Museum

A local bakery

This is the home of Finland's National poet, Johan Ludvig Runegerg. It is Finland's oldest house museum. The Runebergs moved into the building in 1852.

Seeing the inside of this late 19th cent home was an excellent way to finish off our tour of Porvoo.

We returned to the bus station in Helsinki which is beneath a shopping mall and discovered that you could walk from one shopping mall to another via subways. We eventually came back up to ground level near the Chapel of Silence. It is constructed from curving strips of spruce and is used by people who want to escape the stresses of city life for a short time.

I had read in a guide book that if you travel on trams 2 and 3 you will see the whole of Helsinki so we set off to find the Art Nouveau / Art Deco areas of the town. The buildings weren't as unusual as the ones in Riga but they interesting in their own right and well worth the effort of locating them.

We walked back to our hotel via the marina for a well deserved G and T.