Hey Helsinki

I went to Helsinki with an exciting Saturday night arrival. One of the fun parts in exploring an absolutely unknown city is having to find your way to your place from the airport at night. You must be prepared in advance to remember certain objects and names of streets to be sure you can find your address. Helsinki airport is actually in Vantaa, that is, outside Helsinki proper so you take a bus that gets you to the center. Once I was in, the guiding object in my first night was supposed to be Pyöräilystadion: my pre-planned way and directions depended on it. Does not its name sound surreal? It was elusive enough for me: I never actually found it. I was lost in the Helsinki night.

Helsinki is a female city

I was already warm and safe in my apartment when I realized that I had been looking for Pyöräilystadion on the wrong side of a main road. I should have been in a neighborhood called Pasila, and I had been roaming about in Vallila. I began to suspect that Helsinki was capricious. Helsinki is female.

Helsinki has a higher proportion of women (53.4%) than elsewhere in Finland (51.1%). Life expectancy for both genders is slightly below the national averages: 75.1 years for men as compared to 75.7 years, 81.7 years for women as compared to 82.5 years.

Older than Pasila

So I was in Pasila. Pasila is a modern neighborhood built up mainly in the 70s (and 80s) to ease the housing shortage in a period when Helsinki was rapidly expanding. It is basically a residential area with many concrete block houses, red-brick houses, functionalist buildings and a few parks. Consists of a Western (Länsi-Pasila) and an Eastern part (Itä-Pasila) which are connected by an overpass going above railroad tracks. The Pasila Railway Station is perhaps the second most important traffic hub in Helsinki, any train that goes to Helsinki makes a stop in Pasila.

Pasila is generally disliked among locals as the girl on a bus tells me. I inadvertently ask the stupid question to a local elderly lady if she has always lived in Pasila. She looks at me and says: “I am older than Pasila.”

Bicycle Deposits  

In various locations all over the city there are these large heaps of bicycles. Bicycles lie about in a mess in main traffic hubs, places of importance, even on the island Suomenlinna which you can only access by a ferry. They are not neatly arranged, they are rather lousy and shabby, but hey they are public property. You put a coin in the coin slot which you can redeem after you have finished cycling and returned the bike to the Citybike Stand. I did not see too many people riding bicycles, but then, I did not see many people in the streets at all, especially on Sunday which was the first full day of my entire life I spent above the 60^th parallel.