Navigation: Previous Day | Home | Next Day
Turku Day 14 - 25-June

Arrival in Finland
I wake up shortly before we reach Turku. It is 8:00 in the morning local time, in Sweden it is still 7:00. In Turku it is cloudy but very soon the sun is shining. I am happy to see that there is a train station at the harbor and 2 trains to Tampere and Helsinki are ready for departure. I take one of the trains and get out at Turku Central station. Everything in the train and at the station is in 3 languages, Finnish, Swedish and English. That's quite nice because Finnish is a very difficult language. Railway station is "Rautatieasema". Try to find the station if you don't know that!

The abandoned city
The first impression of Turku is that it is rather quiet. In front of the railway station there is a 4-lane road with traffic lights. There are 2 cars waiting and the rest of the street is empty. The reason: It is midsummernight, and that is being celebrated somewhere far away from civilization in a summer cottage up north. Most of the citizens have left the city or are leaving. The hostel is a bit busier, there are tourists over here and everybody is quite surprised about the emptiness of the city.

The canal with a view at the old church

I walk around and find out that at 13:00h all stores will close, so I quickly have a look around the town while there is still something open, there is a market on the main square which is still quite busy. Turku is quite enjoyable as a city. It's smaller then you would expect for a city with nearly 200.000 inhabitants but it's nice. There is an old castle just outside the town centre but it is quite small.

The castle of Turku.

Because the museums are all closed and the shops are closing as well I walk a lot, which is not a punishment in Turku. The cars have the same license plates (3 letters, 3 numbers) as in Sweden, only these are a bit smaller. I Sweden I have been trying to find funny 3-letter words on the license plates but couldn't find any. Here in Turku you don't have to search for it because quite frequently you see a HIP, ELK, OAK, LEG license plate. And there are even some dirty Dutch words to discover.

Because of midsummernight flags are waving on top of all buildings. The streets are empty and for some reason the Dutch flag waves happily at the Nordea bank.

Midsummernight
In the evening I decide to rent a bike. At the hostel I can rent a bike for 4 hours, but they don't really mind if I use it a bit longer. Together with the key they give me a helmet, but there is no way that I am going to cycle with a helmet on. So without helmet and with a free map of cycle tracks I set course to Ruissalo, a small isle 11km further ahead and connected to the city with a bridge. It's the most proximate party location.

The isle is crowded, now I know where all the people are. There are big queues at the camping site on the isle of campers trying to get in/out. The isle itself is really nice. It's not hilly, sometimes just a bump of 5 meters high and the nature is really nice. At 21:00h the bonfire is lit and I see the firefighters driving towards the place the fire takes place. Naturally I can't find the place immediately and I have to ask several Finns what way to go (good thing I wrote down some finnish words on my hand). Eventually I am there in time. There is a large pile of lumber and a maypole, and many people who look quietly at the fire. The fire quite big and keeps on burning for an hour. Nobody knows why they have a fire for midsummernight.

Finnish people are looking at the bonfire.