Fighting off jet lag
With ten hours of jet lag to work through, one turns to less demanding tourist activities. Yesterday, Kathleen and I exerted ourselves to the extent of walking through the main Helsinki open-air market on our way to meet a tour bus; even just that almost completely wore us out.
The market, located right on the waterfront near a lot of tour boats of various kinds, breaks down into two specialties. First, there are a lot of booths selling both reasonable-quality local crafts and the usual run of tourist souvenirs, with even the latter having a reassuringly local flavor. Many of the craft booths sell furs and clothing made from furs, even now, in the summer heat and humidity. (It was in the mid-seventies yesterday, but has hit the mid-eighties recently, we're told.)
The second specialty of the market is local produce, and there's a lot of it. Particularly ubiquitous right now is berries and cherries, and it all looks very yummy. Kathleen picked up some wild strawberries that were so tiny, I'd assumed they would be sour, but no, no, really, they're just fine. Also ubiquitous are fresh peas, still in their pods, great huge mounds of them. There are people everywhere eating them, tourists and locals alike, some without even removing them from the
pod!
The tour bus had been recommended to us by Expedia when we bought our plane tickets. It's focused on Finland's Art Nouveau period, around the turn of the 20th century. We first drove to Hvitträsk, the home of the architects Eliel Saarinen, Herman Gesellius, and Armas Lindgren. Everything man-made on the grounds was designed by the residents, from the buildings and gardens to the furniture, fixtures, decorations, and textiles. The museum there only really covers the Saarinens' portion of the main house, but that's a lot of fun to see. (Kathleen took a lot of pictures that I've used as an excuse to try out Flickr.)
The tour's other stop was Ainola, the home of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and his wife, Aino (after whom the house is named). Overall, this was much less interesting than Hvitträsk, but I still snapped a couple of pictures.
Fortunately, this kind of tour doesn't involve a great deal of walking or other exercise, because by this time, Kathleen and I were nearly asleep on our feet. After returning to downtown Helsinki, we barely had enough energy to buy and consume a couple of pretty good ice cream cones before making our way back to the hotel to crash.
The jet lag has been getting better today, though.