Bear Steak and Reindeer - Reflections of Helsinki

I remember an ad by Investec, asking "Who goes to Helsinki" ... and while my motivations for visiting Helsinki for a weekend was fairly arbitary, it seems that the majority of visitors to Helsinki are Russians, Latvians, Estonians and a smattering of the older American globe-trotters.



Helsinki is a rather compact city, and to be honest not very exciting. While there are certainly a number of impressive architectural specimens with the highlight being Suomenlinna, an old fort built by the Swedish in mid 1700s to protect the city against the Russians, but which did not seem to stop the Russians in 1808 without much resistance.




There are however quite a few interesting cultural points - that were surprising to me. Firstly, fur, is openly traded in the market - not only in clothing, but also as blankets and scarves (one scarf made of a small fox still had the fox head ornamental as part of the scarf).



There is also the language - Suomi (the language of Finland) is very different to every other European language except for Hungarian, but the Finns are very multilingual and almost all speak Swedish (all signs have at least Suomi and Swedish) and English and many other languages.

And then there is the food, specifically the availability of rather exotic meats as part of the menu. Reindeer meat is available in many menus (and is rather indefferent to mutton in my opinion) - but one restaurant I came across also offered Bear steak - for a princely sum of 50 odd Euros for the plate.

Overall, I think Finland has a lot to offer, but more for hiking and wilderness exploration rather than Helsinki itself. And next time, I should save more to afford Bear steak :)