Thursday 27 september 2018
Helsinki
The central/downtown area of Helsinki is pretty compact, so we have seen lots of interesting places in a short time. On Thursday we figured out how to take the bus from our temporary home down to the train station
where we started our latest change of venue. We still had some Danish and Norwegian cash (different currencies) which we turned into Euros, which are more familiar to us and made us feel good. However, after our limited knowledge of German had helped us guess some useful Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish words, we are close to illiterate in Finnish. Try this street sign
whose meaning I haven’t looked up in Google Translate. (It’s very helpful, though unreliable . . . but free, so no complaints.)
That sign is near the Rock Church, which was blasted out of granite in 1969
as you can see from the interior walls. The ceiling is coiled from a 13 mile-long copper ribbon. The people in front were setting up for what looked like a rock band (had to say it) but we got tired of waiting for them to start.
We also visited the brand-new Amos Rex, an exhibition space for contemporary art and film. From the plaza above, you see these wonderful porthills
that look into the space below. People are encouraged to enjoy the hills, and we saw a few groups like this
walking and cavorting around. Inside, you enter the main exhibition space by going downstairs, and thanks to the windows you can see both levels at once
which I thought was pretty unusual. The space is smaller than I expected, but the current installations were interesting. One was a series of very dark rooms with sound and projections on the floors and walls. I can’t explain or illustrate well, but this shot of the “light vortex” might give you an idea:
The other exhibit was from a local philantropist’s collection of post-impressionist paintings. I’m a sucker for pointilism, but I had never heard of Alfred William Finch or his work
and I’ll look for him again.
One more unusual sight was the Chapel of Silence, located very close to Amos Rex. It’s a beautiful large wooden . . . umm . . building
whose interior (absolutely simple, with walls of light-colored wood in bands like the outside) I’m really sorry I couldn’t photograph. They don’t allow photos because the sound might distract the visitors sitting in silence. A few people were apparently meditating, seated on pillows by the wall; mostly, everyone was just sitting on pew-like benches. Silently.
The MHB Foghorn 