Wednesday, March 21, 1984: Got up at 7:40am and went to breakfast. Had hot oatmeal with sugar and bread, jam, cheeses and salami, topped off with a grapefruit. What a day! After breakfast we went on a tour of the city. We saw the university buildings, government buildings, foreign embassies and churches. The first church we saw was amazing. Hopefully my pictures will turn out! Called the Cathedral, it was a very tall, 3-domed Lutheran structure (90 percent of Fins are Lutheran). However, we did see a Greek Orthodox church, which was also nice. Many of the buildings in Helsinki are colored: red, yellow, orange, green, giving the ‘architecture nouveau’ a very creative look throughout the city. We also saw the Baltic Sea, frozen so thick that people drove cars on it. We saw several ships — cruisers — one of which was the world’s best. The Fins specialize in ship building, particularly ice-breakers and cruisers (hello Adam Smith!). You didn’t see the ice-breakers because they were out on the ocean. The weather here is still very cold, although today it was about 30 degrees and sunny all day. There is also about 1-2 feet of snow everywhere.
Around noon we journeyed out into the countryside. The country is very flat but covered with many trees and lakes with small houses scattered about. We arrived at Eliel Saarinen’s original house, which was quite huge with tons of rooms quite modernly furnished. Set amid a forest, there was a beautiful view down to a lake below the house.
We returned to the hotel and left for our game around 4:00. We played a 16-year-old team and won 7-4. I didn’t score. Oh well! After the game we returned to the hotel and ate. The served O.J. with our steak and fries dinner. Soon after we went out looking for a place to dance and meet some people. We got turned down at the first place because you have to be 18. We went to the next place called ‘Happy Days’ and although they let us in it was a drag because it was mostly like a restaurant. Some people stayed and ordered food but we left to look for another place. Just as we walked out of ‘Happy Days’ we hooked up with a group of Fins. One man said ‘hello’ to us in English so Pete asked if he knew a place where we could go. It turned out he had lived in the U.S. but now he was a music teacher and he was walking with students. He knew a place to go, however, so we walked with him and his group to the disco. On the way, we walked past the place where ‘Gorky Park’ was filmed. By the way, my hotel was even in the movie and perhaps even my room — 621! I must see the movie. We found out that the Fins hate the Russians and it bothered them having the Gorky Park set-up in Helsinki because there was a red star on the building and a picture of Lenin. In the words of the man we met, ‘I had to drive to work through there everyday and it pissed me off!’ (peesed me ov!) Well, we finally got to ‘Rocktails’ and unfortunately split off from our little group because they had to go. Because we had half as many people we all got in. The crowd was definitely 20ish and I felt intimidated being only 15 and also because of the fact that I couldn’t know who could speak English and who couldn’t. However, as the evening wore on, I did a little mingling and although some of the older guys danced, I never quite made it. Bruce and I met one woman (22) who was very nice. We talked about schools — she went to the University School in Helsinki, which is very hard to get into because of entrance exams and only 15 percent of the people who graduate from high school can go to college whether they want to or not. She also had the opinion that American schools were very bad! It was really strange when Bruce said he was going to Yale and she said, ‘I could…care less.’ However she was very nice. The styles in the bar were very modern and punk and the music was the same. It was 102.7 music — Thompson Twins, Talking Heads, Reflex, Michael Jackson, 99 Balloons, Police, etc, although they did play ZZ Top once. A few of the men looked like they came right out of Duran Duran with their hair and dress. Everybody seemed to smoke a lot, even the guys. We finally left around 12:30am and walked back to the hotel.
The Finland government is a democratic republic with 200 members of parliament and a president who is elected every six years.
I have to go to bed because it is very late and I have a full day of shopping and touring tomorrow before leaving to Moscow, which is a different world, I hear.
