Just like Korean...

It's hard, honestly, not to feel a bit of a let-down going from the rugged, unsurpassed beauty of a country like Iceland to the man-made beauty of the northern European capitals. From lava, sulfur, and steam, we've transitioned to manicured streets, H&M, and the ubiquitous sushi bar. Or суши-бар. But I'll leave Peggy to write more about Russia.

On to Helsinki. An extraordinarily turbulent Icelandair flight landed us in Europe's second-northern-most capital (I didn't make that up. They pride themselvs in that). Helsinki is, objectively, a very pretty city. Because the country has changed hands many times—the indigenous Sami people were conqured by Vikings, who were then subjected to Swede rule in 1155, after which the country was ceded to the Russians in 1809, who held it until Finnish independence was declared in 1917 (follow?)—there is a slightly disjointed nature to the city, as if each part of its history is vying for prominence. Viz: the Uspensky cathedral was the tallest building in Helsinki until 1852, when the Lutheran cathedral, the Tuomiokirkko, was built.

And that brings up another point about Helsinki...we had a bear of a time trying to pronounce anything. The language is a member of the Uralic family of languages, to which Hungarian and (controversially, of course) Korean also belong. Explain that one. It has fifteen cases, multiple doubled letters and very few cognates with English. This is because it's not of Indo-European descent, making trying to figure out what signs meant pretty difficult.

No problem. To help us along, all signs were bilingual...in Swedish.* It took us a while to figure out that Helsinki and Helsingfors were the same thing.

We left Helsinki on the 5th by train for St. Petersburg. More on that later. Meanwhile, some pictures...

*Not that we're implying that signage should be in English. It's just an observation...