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July 25: Last day in Helsinki

A miserably rainy day. I was intent on visiting Ateneum, Helsinki's main art museum, but Patrick had seen more than enough museums in Tampere and went to check his email in the library while I steeped myself in culture. The Ateneum houses many of Finland's most famous paintings; I was particularly keen to see the works by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Finland's foremost National Romantic painter. Many of his works depict scenes from the Kalevala, the national folk epic which played a large part in shaping the country's national consciousness during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paintings are often bold and stylised, emphasising the symbolic nature of the subjects. In sharp contrast was the roomful of works by his contemporary Helene Schjerfbeck, a sensitive and introverted artist whose portraits have a kind of quiet, moving clarity about them.

The rain stopped and after lunch, we spent a largely aimless afternoon walking randomly and trying to get our hands on sale T-shirts from Stockmann, Finland's largest deparment store. The reason for this was that the finnish for sale is ``ale''. So all the shop dummies in the windows were wearing T-shirts with ``ALE'' in huge red letters on the front, and we naturally coveted these T-shirts desparately.⁴⁷ I exercised my Finnish skills to their fullest extent in an attempt to procure two of these T-shirts, and came very close, but in the end we had to return home empty-handed.

We went back to the hotel for dinner and a sauna (of which we had free use as guests). Obviously an electric hotel sauna isn't a patch on the authentic ``wood-fired sauna and a dip in the lake'' experience, but it was still pleasant. Went to another Finnish film in the evening: Ambush, a love story/war film set during the Russo-Finnish continuation war of 1941-44. I found it strangely similar to most other war films, but then that's what I tend to think of all war films so maybe it's just me. In any case it was good fun with a nice happy ending, and at least the setting and the language made a change.

After the film, we marked the end of our journeyings with a few beers in various bars. Returning to the hostel around half-one, we discovered that the lights we couldn't switch on had switched themselves on, and there was now no way to switch them off. We alerted the receptionist, who came up and diligently searched the room for light switches, even looking in the cupboards, but to no avail. After he'd gone we quietly removed the lampshades, unscrewed the bulbs⁴⁸ and went to sleep.

Footnotes

... desparately.⁴⁷

The Swedish for sale is ``rea'', which was written on the back of the T-shirts. In predominantly Swedish-speaking areas of Finland, where the Swedish wording on signs comes first, shops occasionally have big signs in the window reading REA ALE, which is unnervingly close to REAL ALE.

... bulbs⁴⁸

That's called ``lateral thinking'' if you're a management consultant, or ``common sense'' if you're not.