Our Alla Tour in Helsinki

As I mentioned recently, my sister did most of the planning for our Baltic Sea cruise. She decided to use Alla Tours for the St. Petersburg shore tour, rather than the cruise line (Celebrity). As she and I explored at the Alla Tour options described on their website, we found that they had options in most of the ports we were to visit. If we used them for several tours, we would get a discount. I had friends who had used Alla Tours and recommended them, so we decided to book with Alla.

I signed my husband and me up for tours in Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. My sister and her husband booked these four tours and also a tour in Berlin, which was a 3-hour bus ride away from our ship, and neither my husband and I wanted to spend so much time sitting in a bus.

Our first Alla tour was in Helsinki. The four of us left the ship and found the Alla Tours bus and tour guide. Since my sister and her husband had been with Alla the day before on the Berlin tour, they knew which sign to look for.

I can’t say that we learned a lot about Finnish culture, nor even got a good feel for the city of Helsinki, during the five-hour tour. In fact, my greatest disappointment of the cruise was how rushed and superficial the shore tours felt. I do better when I have about a week in a city to get my bearings with a few landmarks, experience the ambiance of the town, and sometimes even get lost and found again.

I’ve found that water tours are better at grounding me than bus tours. That’s why I enjoyed Amsterdam so much—two canal tours—and I’ve had a boat tour of Copenhagen before, and on this trip we had a boat tour of St. Petersburg.

But in Helsinki, we were driven from stop to stop in a small tour bus.

My favorite part of the Helsinki tour was the Seurasaari Open-Air Museum outside of town. Seurasaari contained a collection of buildings from Finland’s past, much like Williamsburg or other colonial or pioneer towns in the U.S. We saw a small, dark cabin that a tenant family had inhabited, as well as a wealthier farmer’s multi-room house and barn.

I couldn’t help compare these dwellings to the log cabins of the Oregon pioneers. The smaller tenant cabin in Seurasaari was similar to the one-room homes that the emigrants to Oregon built. The larger home was more what an established farmer in 19th-century America might have constructed. Last summer in South Dakota, my husband and I toured a sod hut, which was also about the same size as these homes in Seurasaari.

And all of these dwellings seemed dark and depressing as I walked through them, whether in Finland or the U.S. People of those times everywhere were dependent on firelight or lamps to chase away the dark.

We take our modern conveniences for granted. Electricity. Indoor plumbing. Heat and air conditioning. Despite the romance of the pre-Industrial age, how many of us would give up these amenities?

So my vacation in the Baltic, at least for a few hours, became a time for researching 19th-century housing and reflecting on the times I depict in my novels. But soon we were back aboard the Celebrity Eclipse, ready for our next adventure.

And one more thing about Helsinki . . .

We also stopped at the Temppeliaukio Church (Church of the Rock), a Lutheran church hewn into solid stone. Built in the late 1960s, it is a truly magnificent and awe-inspiring building. A skylight makes the sanctuary feel surprisingly airy, and the stone walls give it substance and strength. It would be a fitting place in which to worship in any culture.

When have you reflected on the similarities and differences of life in earlier times or foreign cultures?