Around the Europe for 30 days, Helsinki (10-Sep-10)

10 September 2010


The end of a breakfast in Scandic Continental and the beginning of a new day. Good Morning!



I left the hotel and went to the Central Railway station to buy InterRail ticket.

Vertical panorama of well-known Mannerheim (linear projection, Hugin).



Panhandler at work near Helsinki Central Railway station. I had a stereotype that I will never met beggars/panhandlers/homeless on the streets of European countries. As it will be shown, this meeting was not the last.



Postal office is also placed near the Central Railway station. Nice neon sign.


I recalled immediately Soviet Grocery store, when I saw the entrance to the Postal office. From the very first sight, it looked like Postal Office was selling everything but not the stamps, envelopes and postcards.



By the way, previous photo may help you if you want to find business hours of Helsinki's Postal Office.

And afterall, I came to the Central station and bought Interrail Global Pass. This kind of ticket allows you to take any train in Europe and pay nothing or pay a little for the seat reservation. Some of the participants are not related to trains at all (e.g. some ferries offers discount for Interrail owners).



I had a lot of time before my ferry to Rostock, so I decided to walk around.

The travel journal in the Postal Museum's store had the map of the USSR on it:


The Postal museum was very interactive. This museum is the perfect example for me what may happen if things are organized and managed well.

Postal car:


Post in different times:


Postcards of different times (horizontal panorama):


Interactive Postman game. Bike is the game controller: everybody can drive the bike of the postman to help him deliver the post.



I left the postal museum.

...To be continued.

P.S. You can always find all posts related to my trip if you will search posts by tag "around the europe".

Around the Europe for 30 days, Helsinki (09-Sep-10)

Hi,

I'm going to start posting here photos from my railroad trip around the Europe (2010'09 - 2010'10).
Let's get started! The first part is Helsinki, Finland.

My trip started in my hometown, Saint Petersburg. It is not that Saint Petersburg in Florida, USA, but the original one - Saint Petersburg in Russian Federation.

Helsinki is the capital of Finland and can be reached by train Saint-Petersburg - Helsinki for example. At the time of writing, the fastest train (a.k.a. "Allegro") will overcome this distance in about three hours, but at the time of my trip it was six hours (this train was known as "Sibelius").

09-Sep-2010
Hometown, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Finland Railway station.

Inside the car of "Sibelius" train. The car was almost filled with a group of tourists from Asia (as far as I remember, they were from Indonesia).

I took afternoon Sibelius, so I arrived at night to Helsinki Central Railway station (aka Helsingin päärautatieasema and Helsingfors centralstation in Finnish and Swedish accordingly). The station is organized well and not so big, so there was no problem to navigate in the right direction.



I booked room for one night in Scandic Continental online via booking.com. This hotel is in walking distance from the Helsinki Central Railway station (~10-15 minutes) and can be reached easily.

Try to find some panorama stitching bugs on the photo of my room in Scandic Continental:


P.S. You can always find all posts related to my trip if you will search posts by tag "around the europe".