Baltic Sea Cruise: Part 3 (Finland and Sweden)

Cruise Day 9: Helsinki, Finland

I feel a little bit bad for Helsinki, following immediately on the back of St. Petersburg... and besides the weather didn't want to cooperate either; which didn't help matters. But despite all that, we were determined to be excited about Finland because Allen's sister, Sally, spent a year there before college and only had wonderful things to say about Finland and the Finnish people.... and a particular licorice sweet called Turkish Pepper. So...

Ohhhhhhh.....

Ahhhhhhh.....

Ice breakers down from the north for the summer

Funny enough, we happened to be there on Helsinki's founding day (June 12, 1550), which they celebrated with a samba carnival. No joke, those are the floats of the various samba schools setting up on the center of town. Our tour guide felt bad for the girls in bikinis dancing on these floats in the rain.... But.... Samba? Carnival? Finland? (shrug) Best not to ask too many questions.

Cruise Day 10: Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm was also remarkably pretty.

Nikki in front of the Nobel Museum

Old medieval alleyways

But Stockholm was also where we did easily the coolest excursion of our trip. We walked on top of the roof of this building.

A roof-top tour - only the second city in the world to do this type of thing (the other city also being in Sweden).

They decked us out in some pretty serious full body harnesses .... but considering what we were walking on...

... the harnesses definitely did the trick of making us feel safer. That said, you really couldn't beat the views we had.

It was a really amazing way to see the city - an experience we're sure to hold on to.

The other big excitement for this port was we were finally able to find Sally's licorice candy, Turkish Pepper.

We had a tour guide that recommended, instead of getting Swedish glass, that we bring home local delicacies like Surströmming, fermented herring that is a favorite up in the North (she was kidding*) .... we pounced on this advice and asked her if she knew about this Finnish sweet we were on the hunt for. Given, as she told us Swedes eat approximately 1kg of sweets a week each, she told us that yes they had this sweet and the best place to look for it would be a local convenience store.

Who would have thunk it?

But we found them ... and they are "interesting" ... they are salty licorice, which I guess is an acquired taste. But we found them! Which was awesome!

The other craze sweeping the nation was the up-coming (now completed) wedding of the Swedish Crowned Princess Victoria to Daniel Westling, her former personal trainer. Stockholm was the city of love in preparation for the nuptials ... and there were signs of everyone's enthusiasm everywhere you turned.

Back in the old part of town they have a little statute of a boy made out of iron. It is said that if you rub his head you'll come back to Stockholm someday.

Fingers crossed.

_________________________________

* Apparently it is inadvisable to travel with cans of this stuff because depending upon how old they are they are likely to explode. - although there is debate about whether or not this is just a myth or not.