September 7

If it is Sunday, it must be Helsinki, Finland


The pictures are:

Lunch stand at the market

Reindeer Lunch

Steps up to the Lutheran Cathedral

Inside the Rock Church

We set our clocks back so we woke up with finally enough sleep and looked out our deck at the port of Helsinki. Ed’s heritage is Finnish so going to Helsinki was something he was looking forward to.

We slept in a little and left the ship at 9:00am and took the ship’s shuttle to the center of the city. From there we walked down to the main market square where all the easy-ups were being set up by the vendors and the food stands were already selling their food.

We decided to take the ferry to Suomenlinna Fortress, which is an island fortress guarding the port. The fortress was built in the 1700’s when Finland was part of Sweden. It is also an island home now to 900 residents; however, we only saw a couple of people – it was a little eerie. The military only stopped using it 30 years ago.

Then it was back to the market where we had a wonderful lunch of reindeer sausage, reindeer "meatloaf", potatoes and salad.

We then took a walking tour through the central city, including the Lutheran Cathedral and then the Rock Church, a beautiful church carved right out of rock. It was very spiritual inside.

Back to the shuttle bus to the ship and it was time to relax before looking at pictures and on to dinner.

Dinner of course was fine and then it was off to the show. Tonight it was amateur night and there were four acts and three out of four were really bad. The cruise director had the exact same bad jokes that he had on our last cruise. Sometimes amateur night is good sometimes bad – this was the bad night.

Then it was on to the casino where Ed had his biggest loss (he is still ahead) and Barb was another winner.

The good news is that we set the clocks back for the second time on the cruise tonight and tomorrow is a day at sea – so good night for now.