Wednesday, August 28
My shirts and underwear were dry by the time i got done writing yesterday's log at midnight last night! Very excited about dry clothing!
Socks weren't quite there, though.
So when i woke up this morning, i set them out to dry again, hanging them over the rails of my upper bunk. These socks are so much thinner than the ones i usually wear. I don't understand why they take so long to dry.
Even though i was done writing the log at midnight, and other than folding my laundry and putting it away (three shirts and four pairs of boxers), i don't remember doing anything else, i didn't get to sleep until 2am. Honestly. No accounting for time.
So i didn't wake up until 9:30 or so. And as i'm lying there, awake on the bed, scrolling through my various feeds, as i am wont to do when i wake up, suddenly i realized, oh yeah, didn't i pre-pay for a breakfast buffet?
I got up, got dressed, and strolled into the common area at 10:07.
Breakfast ended at 10.
Mother.
Fucker.
I was not able to get a refund for the meal, either. Which is annoying, but it's only 7 euros, i guess i can weather this hardship.
I grabbed my amino powder and sat down to mix it into some water, the way i usually start my day. And as i was doing that, i received a message on BeWelcome.
Someone wants to hang out and show me around in Vilnius, Lithuania. That's great!
I think i forgot to mention in my log earlier, but this is not the only communication i've gotten from BeWelcome. BeWelcome is one of the Couchsurfing alternatives i had written about several days ago; this is the one where i was able to construct my trip and say i'm looking for hosts and/or guides. I said i didn't expect anything to come from it, given how difficult of a time i've had reaching out; sitting back and expecting others to contact me just felt like it was never going to happen.
But it has! I have a guide lined up in Tallinn, Estonia, whom i've actually been communicating with today, as my arrival there is impending. She will not be hosting me, so i still booked a hostel, but she's a native, and she's happy to share her city.
And now i have one for Vilnius, as well! I don't think she's hosting me either, but it's someone to spend time with and get a real tour with, instead of just bumbling around on my own with Atlas Obscura and Google Maps and the other miscellaneous spreadsheets and Instagram folders i've assembled haphazardly.
I did also get an offer from a host in Berlin, but i ended up turning him down. 68-year-old Canadian nudist, looking for young men to be nude with. Best of luck to you, but that's not for me. I messaged back, declining respectfully, saying i'm not interested in nudism and i feel it would be rude of me to ask him to wear clothing in his own home.
Getting the offer of a guide in Vilnius made me realize that i needed to firm up my travel plans for the next couple days. If i was going to be leaving Helsinki for Tallinn tomorrow, i'd better get that ferry booked.
The ferry schedules for tomorrow were not feasible for me. There were two, and they were either way too early or way too late. So i looked at Friday. This offered the same two ferry runs, but also a third one at 2:15pm.
I checked with the desk clerk, and was able to extend my stay at CheapSleep for one more day. I booked the 2:15 ferry on Friday.
I am a bit miffed that i'm losing a bunch of Tallinn time. I've been telling people for months in advance of this trip that i'm actually really excited about Estonia. But i'm in a position where i need to accelerate my travel through the eastern European states, if i'm going to make it to Paris on time. So i'm still leaving Tallinn on Sunday.
At least i can use that second breakfast voucher now.
So this pushed me to look at the full travel schedule to Vilnius, to make sure i'm giving my guide a proper timetable. And...this is where shit got complicated. Evidently there is a "disrupted international connection" between Estonia and Latvia, so there are no trains between Tallinn and Riga.
I spent what was left of my morning solving this problem. I'll have to take a train from Tallinn to Valga, and then a bus from Valga to Riga. Once i'm in Riga, there should be no issue getting to Vilnius. And while my Eurail pass did not cover the bus, it did get me a 20% discount.
So with that bit of inconvenience cleared up, i decided i should head out for the day. I hadn't gotten my breakfast, so the first point of order was getting something to eat.
I thought i was headed for a little café called "Restaurant Dylan Corner," but when i got there, it was in the lower level of a large office building, and it was a buffet. The registers were fully automated, and even pushing the "English" button did not turn the words to English, so i fumbled through it and paid for a buffet.
There were many unfamiliar items on that buffet line, and i ate several of them. I got something with eggplant in it for sure. But the crown jewel of that buffet, as far as i was concerned, was the baked salmon. Holy hell. These Nordic countries do incredible things with fish.
To the surprise of no one, i'm sure.
I jumped on the tram back down to the docks, where i first entered Helsinki. I thought maybe i'd get the Fortress of Suomenlinna and the Helsinki Cathedral done today. Fortress first.
This is the huge island naval base i had noted passing by on the ferry in yesterday. From the water, the walls and structures look impressive. I took another ferry out to the island to see it. A much smaller ferry, which took 10 minutes.
Had a little bit of an issue getting on the boat, though. It was supposed to be covered by the same pass that i bought for the tram, but i kept scanning it and it wouldn't open the gate. I tried every terminal. The digital countdown until the ferry left was at one minute, then ticked to zero. I thought i'd just wait and catch the next one, giving me time to figure out what was going on, but then impulsively i just hurried over to the kiosk and bought a second pass. Except the kiosk didn't give me an actual pass, just a receipt with a QR code, which the gate wouldn't read.
One of the ferry workers started waving his arms from the boat. "The gate is open, just come in!" So i pushed on the turnstile, and sure enough, it just let me through.
"Thank you," i told him as he closed the boat up behind me.
We were almost to the island when i reached into my other pocket and found a second card, only then realizing that i had been trying to get on the ferry by scanning the room key to the hostel.
Idiot.
Sveaborg began construction in 1748 and took 40 years to complete. It was commissioned by the King of Sweden, when Sweden owned Finland, and served as a Swedish naval base up through the Russo-Swedish War, when the base fell to Russia. It would remain a Russian military facility for 110 years, until the Finnish Civil War, when it was taken over by the newly formed Finnish government in 1918. They renamed it Suomenlinna, the Castle of Finland.
Beginning in the 1960s, defense forces began moving out and renovations were done to turn it into a residential and tourist facility. It was recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1991. Today, about 800 people live in Suomenlinna, which comprises six islands connected by bridges.
I guess i thought i was walking into a museum, but it really is a living community. There are shops and restaurants all around, occupying many former military buildings. Almost immediately, i wished i had not gone to that buffet, so i could have experienced the island cuisine, but i wasn't planning on sticking around long enough to need dinner.
I had arrived on the island 17 minutes too late for the last English-language guided tour, so i was just making my way around with a map. The map has a blue route marked, which is considered the ideal path to see the base's most interesting features. I got lost almost immediately, but found my way on and off the path as time went on.
One thing i did see before i went rogue was the Suomenlinna Church, a tall white building in the middle of all of this. It's tall enough that it's plainly visible from the mainland, over the island's tree cover. I didn't go in; it's one of a dozen or more museums on the island, and all of them charge their own separate entry fees, and i just didn't feel like that was gonna be worth it. But i walked around the grounds, and the church is surrounded by a fascinating circular "fence." Every ten feet, there are three cannons set upright on their muzzles, so if they fired, the ball would go straight into the Earth, and there are huge, heavy chains crisscrossed between them. These chains probably came from ships. Each link is the length of my forearm, and the metal is just as thick. I checked each cannon as i walked past it, they were all inscribed with either "1786" or 1787." I'm assuming those are either the years the cannons were cast, or the years they were decommissioned.
Apparently today was my "wandering into deep, dark holes day" because i kept seeing dark tunnels leading underground to who knows where and just fuckin' diving in. Nothing bad happened. But mostly what i saw was abandoned brick tunnels from hundreds of years ago that today serve no purpose.
After i'd ventured through to what i thought was the end of the blue route, i saw a path leading up and over a levee, and spontaneously took it. I found myself on a rocky embankment overlooking the water, as waves crashed up between the boulders, and the sun started thinking about setting. At first, i thought i would just sit down and watch the waves for a few minutes before turning back inland, but after i got up, i instead decided to keep following the boulders out to sea. And then winding a path around the trees, out of view of the mainland, just hopping from boulder to boulder.
Every now and then, i'd find another good spot to have a sit and watch the Baltic Sea churn for a bit, then get up, and wander away until i found another nice spot. I don't know how long i did this. An hour? Boulders and pathways just kept opening up. Occasionally there was a nice wooden bridge to cross. Some of the boulders were engraved with Russian words, probably hundreds of years old.
Eventually, i realized i could just keep going until i'd circled the perimeter of the entire main island, and i didn't think i actually wanted to do that. I found a path that led away from the water and took it.
This brought me up behind some unfamiliar buildings. I had no idea where i was. But it did lead me to the Suomenlinna Dry Dock, where the decaying remains of several naval vessels spanning the ages sit on display. I would not have found this otherwise.
I was heading back toward the dock when i thought, eh, fuck it. I'm gonna get me some of that Suomenlinna food anyway. One of the first restaurants i'd seen, Adlerfelt, had its menu outside the building, and i'd given it a look on my first pass. This was about when i had first thought "wish i hadn't eaten" because a lot of their items looked incredible, and incredibly Finnish.
I walked in, and was greeted by a sticker on the door that said, "We speak gay."
I ordered the "preserved Baltic herring with summer potatoes and poached egg," an item which was only named by its description.
I guess i was still thinking of the island as kind of a museum experience, and this restaurant as more of a café situation, but it was actually kind of a fancy, expensive place. They had tried to get me to order wine with the meal, but i didn't want that. This herring dish, which was priced like a meal, was very clearly meant to be an appetizer.
But they also brought me a whole bunch of bread, and the herring, potatoes, and egg were fuckin' delicious, and that all turned out to be the right amount of food for me anyway. I loved it.
This is the only place on the trip so far that has prompted me to tip when i paid. That sort of thing just isn't typically done in Scandinavia. But what was really interesting was, the amount i was prompted to tip was...5%. Since i was tipping anyway, i clicked the button for the highest tip, and that was still only 10%.
I returned to the mainland, once again boarding the ferry just as it was about to close up and pull away. I once again felt like it was too late to do a cathedral tour, so i just headed back to the hostel. I had additional housekeeping tasks to complete anyway.
I set up my computer and all my peripherals on my bunk and finally did all that data management i've been putting off since the last day in Copenhagen. I started at 7 and it's almost midnight now, but i think my data is as managed as it's going to get.
I have a bit of a problem. I brought two 5TB hard drives with me to store all the footage from the four cameras and two audio devices i brought with, and while i was in Copenhagen, i could not get data to transfer to them properly. I couldn't figure out the issue, but i figured the priority was adventure, so i didn't end up dealing with it.
One of them is working now. The other one...i am afraid has died. The plan was to mirror them, so that i always had a backup, in case one went down. I didn't expect one to be DOA.
I'm not going to trust all my precious footage to a single, four-year-old portable hard drive. I've shot a lot less footage than i had prepared for anyway, and i brought quite a few extra SD cards that i hadn't anticipated needing; they are slow and old and much lower capacity than what i usually use now, i just figured i might as well fill up my SD card wallet. So i've devised a system where i'm leaving data on the SD cards after it's dumped to the drive, and some of the old, slow cards are getting data backed up onto them. Everything should be stored in two physical locations at all times. There's also the advantage that my SD card wallet is on my person at all times, so even if my backpack gets stolen, i've still got my footage.
This is not ideal, but hopefully it works.
The possibility that i may break down and just buy another hard drive is on the table, though.
Alright! I think that's all i've got for today. Tomorrow's another full day in Helsinki, which i hadn't expected, so i guess i'll get to that cathedral after all!
Probably.
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