Helsinki city trip top things to do

This is part 2 or my Helsinki write up, see part 1 about where we stayed and what the city is like. This one is all the attractions we visited. It’s getting very long, but I wanted to record it all!

The central station is a very cool art nouveau building with giants holding up laterns as pillars. Weirdly this was the thing that made Dave think of Helsinki as a place to go and also was the only thing I could have told you about Helsinki before I started researching for this trip, because I saw the giant statues dressed in the green Käärijä jackets for Eurovision 2023.

Suomenlinna, a fortress island that predates the actual city and is a UNESCO world heritage site. Mainly just a nice island to walk around, there are a couple of local history museums, old houses, wee crafty shops and workshops, cafes and restaurant and a submarine for some reason, all in a nice walking loop. The ferry you get over was included in our week ticket. Apparently it's a hipster place to actually live. Not sure if I'd want to live somewhere with so many people walking about, mind!

Seurasaari, another island, with an open air museum of historic buildings from all over Finland that have been brought there you can see the different architectural styles, with some people in historic costumes to explain stuff. You access the island by a bridge, and you can actually just walk around it, the museum fee is just go go into the houses. You have to get a bus there (or you could cycle) the bus ride is a nice one that takes you past the Sibelius monument, and some beaches and harbours.

The Sibelius monument is a large metal structure for the late 19th-early 20th century composer. I actually expected this to be slightly larger than it is, and to somehow be pipes that make a sound. But it's still cool and there's a good playpark next to it

Rock church. This is a big circular church whose walls are dug into a rock, and it has a big domed copper roof. There's also a rock garden on the hill it makes, which weirdly had several sunbathers in.

Pasila street art area. This is an area with lots of amazing streetart. I was wxpwcting something hipstery like Prenzlauerberg in Berlin, but actually it's a residential area with lots of 1960s (?) apartment blocks, that was also weirdly deserted. There are a lot of concrete walkways and underpasses, and that's where all the streetart is.

From Pasila we walked (along a not super pleasant wide road, but if you come from the centre is nicer) to Vallila, which is an area of low rise wooden houses in the middle of all the apartment blocks. We didn't spend huge amounts there, cos we had all the wooden houses in our commuter town, but it is definitely different from the rest of the city!

Kiasma museum of contemporary art. We walked past this and were attracted by some big inflatables in this museum, and then it turned out it was free entry the next day (first Friday of the month) and it was really fun. The inflatables were petroleum chamical compounds, part of an exhibition by Kuwait artist Monira al Qadiri about her country, and there was another great exhibition about the use of different materials. Obviously depends on the exhibitions. There are several big contemporary art museums you can visit.

There are two central lakes just north of the station that are nice to walk around, and have various things on the shore, like the Olympic stadium, an Alvarado Aalto designed concert hall, old wooden houses in a surprising state of disrepair, various playgrounds and place where you can rent canoes

North west of one of the lakes is the Kallio area, which is as close to a hipster area as we found, with various vintage shops, colourful buildings and some excellent traffic calming street furniture I got very excited about. A few pictures from there in the first post.

Kamppi flea market. The day we went here was the one say the weather wasn’t great, so ut was quite quiet, with lots of lots not taken. But some fun stalls with lots of homewares and Marimekko, on aq sunnier day this would have been brilliant.

To get to Kamppi on foot you walk through an area called the design district, which has lots of fancy interior design shops and a few clothes one. This had the most interestingly designed buildings we saw, some really cool art deco stuff. And the most amazing shop selling handmade small batch toys/trinkets. Not really for kids! Some extremely fun Russian dolls (my fave was the vegetable one), and the walls are painted in multicolour stripes that merge into the shelves. Only open very infrequently but definitely an experience!