August 6th - A couple more things about Helsinki, Finland

There were a couple more items we wanted to share with you with regards to Helsinki. In the first picture below, this was a church built by two brothers that had to blast the granite out of this in the center of town in Helsinki.  The day we came to visit it, there was a  music camp practicing in this church. I started talking to one of the parents about the camp and was told in order to be eligible for this music camp you had to be a Nordic citizen and they have this camp once a year and students from all the Nordic countries, including Greenland and Iceland, come to participate as well as teachers, parents or even grandparents.  I don't know if you can see it very well in the picture, but the walls are granite, the windows sit on top of the granite, then the ceiling, which is more difficult to see, is made up of 13 miles of copper coil. This was a very interesting church.

I mentioned bike paths dedicated strictly for cyclist. In this picture you can see the bicycle and pedestrian "highway" which I think was probably, once upon a time, where the train ran through the town and as the town grew they relocated the train tracks. But that's pure speculation on my part although it looks like that's very possible to me.

OBSERVATIONS:

• so here we are in our region of the world where nearly all the people seem to have blonde hair. I found it rather interesting that there were many people, mostly younger, that dye their blonde hair grey. I was in style and didn't even know it!