Weekend Travelling Part I - Turku

I was worried that I would never get a chance to see much of Finland, as I don't get any holiday from my university at all until the end of December (when I have to go home). I've now got my timetable and luckily, while most days are insanely long, I have no classes on Fridays which gives me a nice 3-day weekend. I decided to take advantage of this at the end of my first week, by travelling somewhere although I wasn't sure where to go. I called around and nobody else could come, they either had uni or no money, except for Gernot who was in Tampere and wanted to go to Turku so I decided to meet him there.

I even made a map!

The train left Helsinki at 0903 on Friday and arrived in Turku 2 hours later. Turku is the former capital of Finland and its oldest city. Situated in the far South-West of the country, it was the first major point settled by the Swedes due to its close proximity to Sweden. It has been burnt down an amazing 30 times, leading the Russians during their rule to move the capital further East to more easily-defendable Helsinki (and no doubt where they could keep a better eye on things). Turku is now considered Finland's second city and also has one of the largest Swedish-speaking populations in the country.

Turku Castle

I admit I was a bit dissapointed with Turku. After a few hours of walking around the city, I had already seen most of the main sights. Having been burnt-down so many times, there are few historic sights left and much of the city seems to be generic concrete and steel apartment blocks. The river is nice though, with a few historic ships to visit and near the harbour there is the rather impressive Turku Castle, although it was mostly destroyed in WWII and has subsequently been only partially restored.

The old town square

The best part of the city for me was the remaining historic area, around the Cathedral of Turku. It's quite small, but very pleasant and has more character than the rest of the city. The cathedral itself is impressively large and is the main landmark in the city.

Cathedral of Turku

The city was also extremely quiet, which was strange after coming from Helsinki. We seemed to be the only people in the castle and even the promenades by the river were deserted. Things picked up a bit at night, when we met with Sebastian, Lena and Sophie from the language course who now study in Turku. After going to a riverboat-bar, we followed Sebastian to a few other bars packed with students (and much cheaper than Helsinki).

Sebastian insisted I took a photo of the first arm-stamp he got in a club in Finland

We had to head back fairly early as on Saturday me and Gernot had to get the 0845 ferry to Aland, between Finland and Sweden. More on that soon!

For now, there are lots more photos in my Finland Gallery on my Flickr site. Please take a look!