15 July

But my point remains; our floating hotel was docked in Helsinki the next morning. Being old veterans of Helsinki after our last conquest in the early 90s, my mother and I esteemed ourselves to be beyond the shore excursions and bus rides to the center of town. We wandered through the docks to the public bus and rode it downtown. Finnish, incomprehensible as it may be, was much easier for us than Russian. I had been puzzling through the Cyrillic by process of elimination and scouring my databanks since I had the script memorized in 1990. Suddenly now everything was in Roman script and there were cognates from time to time to guide us. Heck, we could pronounce some of the words! Most people seemed to speak either English or Swedish.

We had decided we wanted to see the church dug out of a rock. We did. It was. See pictures.

Helsinki is nice. It’s clean. It has some things to see. We walked around a lot.

Ian, the shore excursion director, had recommended a certain bus line in Helsinki. Ian, you see, was available 24/7 on the ship’s closed circuit TV, talking about our next destination, looped over and over. We found said bus and it promptly drove us away from the city center. The buildings were getting smaller and smaller and ever less interesting. Ian, you see, was wrong. But he was a pompous Brit (sorry, is that redundant?) and neither of us wanted to correct him. Plus, we had gotten second place in Ian’s Travel Trivia and didn’t want to jeopardize our shot at first – which we won the second time around. Luckily for us, the bus eventually looped back into town. That was enough Helsinki for us.