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Thu, 31 Aug 2006

Back from Scandinavian trip.


I've just returned from small 4 days vacations in Finland and Sweden.
If you want my brief opinion on how it was, then I can say, that it was exteremely good time there.

Day 1.
Moscow - St. Petersburg train trip.
Since train moved the whole day (from 10:30 to 19:00), some beer was taken and Confucian book. There were very interesting neighbours - Shvechikov Alexey Nikolaevich - professor of history of religion and his wife. We had a very interesting discussion about technical world and history, about Confucianism and various religions, about "Russian Way" and does it exist at all, how country and nation intellectual development happend and where it will end up. He wrote a book "Religion. History. Science. History of western civilization. Experience of hitsory-metodological research." about civilization evolution and where and how russian way (I still do not agree with him, I think that at least right now we do not have any such "way" except eating nature resources and steal from each other) was created and changed. That book will be available in January.

When we were in St. Petersburg we found an extremely good bookshop - Bukvoed - gigantic selection of books, nice cafe where you can read them, nice music... I definitely recommend it for everyone who will be there - it is situated just near Revolt square (ploshad' Vosstaniya).

Day 2.
We started to move to Helsinki in about 1 A.M. and arrived there early morning (about 8:00 or 9:00).
We found that there is either still a weekend in Monday or people in Helsinki start to work later - there were almost no people on the streets (although it is quite small amount of them at all - about 5.5 millions of people in the whole country, which is about 2 times smaller than in Moscow).
I think finland built kommunism (or something very good at least) - all people look very happy, they respect each other and rules (for example if you even try to cross the street, vast majority of drivers will stop even if there are no crossing lines). Almost everyone knows english (and two other national languages - finnish and swedish). We had some small dinner - and paid only for beer and (very big) main dish - garnish, salad, soup, tea and coffee all for free. I never saw such restaurants in Moscow, although there some of them which provide some kind of buffet table.
Drivers are very calm - no signals, no racers, if there is 30 km/h speed limit, than everyone will move with that speed, I did not see there any traffic jams.
I only saw police car three times, and there is no road police there (at least in Helsinki).

It is extremely good country, but all it's advantages are completely destroyed by one main disadvantge (for me at least): I like russain type of women much more than scnadinavian one :), so I will not move there at least for now.

We moved to Sweden from finland city Turku on gigantic ship "Silja Europe", which is really a small city in the sea - it has just everything you can imagine.

Day 3.
Sweden. We arrived to Stockholm early morning and had a small tour of the city.
I especially liked small sailing ships moored not far from city hall.
We visited "Wasa" museum (which was original goal of my tour) - museum devoted completely to one ship built in 17'th century (it was sunk in the first voyage), which was extremely interesting.
Then me and Grange put out to sea on Sweden Grand Royal Navy pride ship - rented canoe on Jurgarden island ("Animal's isalnd", sorry if I call it wrong), which was successfully ended in an hour. While being afloat some tourists had photos of us naively thinking that we are Stockholm's aborigins.
While walking on Stockholm's streets, we found interesting bar called "Oliver Twist" (it looks like it is english bar in Stockholm) where had a dinner and drunk some swedish beer - it was not bad, had very interesting taste, but (as long as finnish one) I do not like it. Bar itself was relly nice place - if you want to find it, you need to move left from King's palace to the neighbour island, then move upstairs over some very busy street and you can find it somewhere not far from local church (well, not very productive description, but I can not remember and even read swedish street names, although they look simpler than finnish ones). Moving back we had a walk not over central foot-street (it looks like it is really the place where only tourists walk like Arbat in Moscow), but on other very busy street, where found that Stockholm's life is exactly the same as in Moscow - busy crowds of people, racers and bad drivers on roads (although not as much as on Moscow streets) and so on - usual busy life from usual busy city, but not something new like Helsinki.

There are a lot of cyclists in Helsinki and Stockholm - they are full members of traffic flows, there are a lot of special bicycle lanes in parallel with footpathes and car roads. I've found that cyclists do not stop (even try to stop) when you cross theirs line, which can be quite danger. We moved back to Finland on "Silja Festival" ship - it is slighlty smaller than "Silja Europe", but still is a city in the sea - very powerfull construction on the water.

Day 4.
We spent several hours in Helsinki, moved to the far outskirts of town and found that sleeping districts are built right in the forest - small buildings of three-four floors, most of which are even smaller than surrounding pine-trees.

Then we moed back to St. Petersburg, sat in the book-cafe, where I bought myself a book about russian history from 9 to 20 centuries and moved to Moscow, where I write this story.

Expect a lot of photos soon!
It was really good journey to completely different world. I enjoied it very much.

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