At the end of January I got up terribly early and trudged through a black Petersburg morning to get on a bus alone and go the 9 hours to Helsinki. My separate rangefinder died on this trip, and thus began my string of bad photo equipment luck.




Helsinki was a surprisingly small and walkable city. The city center itself is like a 45 minute walk from one end to the other, and even the place I was staying, though not really near the center, was still doable on foot.






The botanic gardens were adorably small.




I have heard some Russians joke that Finns are so physically active because there is nothing else to do in Finland, but I found the sportiness charming.




It was evident that Helsinki had a past interlaced with Russia (the statue in this square is a Russian tsar), but it was also modern, European, and shockingly (given their proximity) different in mentality from St. Petersburg.