Summer in Helsinki

Helsinki is a beautiful city, it is clean and the people are friendly. Every green space, no matter how small, is perfectly manicured and many are planted out with riots of colourful flowers. We have been told that some of this friendliness grows with the summer sun, and we were there at the peak of Helsinki’s good weather.

Sometimes in Australia we take good weather and long days for granted, but not the Finns. They embrace summer to the point where every little green space is filled with people picnicking, sunbaking, running, playing, cycling, or just relaxing and watching the world go by. It seemed like the whole city had taken the day off to enjoy the sun, we passed by a ‘beach’ which was an inlet less than the size of a tennis court with murky water and very full of slime-like seaweed but despite this every inch of it was full of people swimming in apparent blissful enjoyment. When the temperatures for January look like this you can see why.

The streets of Helsinki are really interesting. Every street corner has pedestrian crossings on all four roads, there are on-road and off-road cycle lanes everywhere, and who gets the right of way isn’t determined by size. Cars, bikes and pedestrians really are on an equal footing.

The contrast with Manchester and Liverpool is really striking. While both English cities have lovely areas the overwhelming feeling as you enter them is that they are industrial cities that have grown up. Any street art, or building decoration is, well, not quite lipstick on a pig, but you get the idea. The streets are also spotless – I didn’t notice how little chewing gum there was in the streets until we got to Manchester, where it’s everywhere. We saw ordinary people picking up rubbish on the streets as they went past.

It is striking how the buildings in Helsinki have been adapted to the weather conditions. They have tall, steeply pitched rooves with snow fences along the bottom to protect pedestrians (and I just discovered that they also keep snow on the roof to help insulate the building). The windows have an outer single glazed window, then a foot of space – sometimes with little displays of ornaments - then an inner double glazed window. The apartment doors are double doors, with space in the middle for leaving boots to dry. Most doorways have grates or grills outside and big doormats inside to catch snow and water from shoes and boots. For all this, the buildings are, by and large, beautiful. Clean, colourful and immaculately maintained facades are just about everywhere.