Turku

Last saurday, I went to Turku with Kerstin. We left late in the morning from Helsinki station on a beautiful autumn day. Finnish trains are a very nice thing - if you manage to buy your ticket at a machine not able to speak English to you and you need a Visa Electron or something similar. In Helsinki we just asked a random bystander for help, in Turku I managed myself.

Turku really is a very nice city. It is the oldest town in Finland, dating back to the 13th century. We visited the historical museum, the tourist info; went on a nice long walk to the fortress/castle where we went through the exhibition and also saw some 'real' knights running around. The castle in itself is quite nice, and it seems to have been on the brink of falling down, but was saved and renovated (very creatively). The ceilings for example, you can sometimes see, that there was a curved ceiling before and now they put one out of concrete there. When you are used to the Austrian Denkmalschutz, thats quite an experience. But on the other hand, there are some things that become possible through that, for example adapting the castle to modern purposes and in that way giving it some new live as it doesn't look so lifeless. And some ideas are really cool, like using all the small niches in the walls as book shelfs and making the window niches cozy with boards to sit on.

The next thing we did was walk back to the center and then got some food which we had outside at the promenade at the river. It was very nice, as the sun just started setting, the only problem being the low temperatures.

After having some beer in an old toilet house and getting warm again, we went to the railway station to get the next best train to Helsinki back after persuading the machine to give us two student tickets.