Naantali...

[khiemtran]

So, I'm at Border Control at Helsinki-Vantaa airport, after thirty hours of travel. It's early afternoon. At this stage, I'm not yet aware that my luggage won't be meeting me for three days, but I do know I've got three to four more hours of land transport to negotiate before I can sleep.


At this stage, I don't think I'm up for my first real conversation in Finnish, so I talk to the immigration officer in English. She asks me where I'm staying and I tell her "Naantali".

"Where?" she asks, looking puzzled.

"Naantali," I say again, slowly, in my best attempt at the proper pronunciation.

Another blank look. "Oh!" she says, suddenly, with a big smile. "Naantali!"

This does not bode well for my future ability to communicate, but she waves me through and I'm back into Europe.

Naantali (after various adventures en route) turns out to be a very pleasant place. It features one of the oldest churches in Finland, and indeed is one of the oldest towns as well.

Here's the church on a Sunday morning...


It has a very nice Old Town, where people still live.


A marina full of boats...


And lots of picturesque buildings...

Actually, this is quite a bad picture of this one, but I was trying to cut out the parked cars in front. Ah well.

Even more exciting, for me at least, was the presence of a supermarket which was open on Sundays where I could buy some toiletries and a razor.

Naantali also has some famous neighbours, including Moomin World and Kultaranta, the summer residence of the Finnish president. As an aside, kulta means gold and ranta means shore or beach, so kultaranta just means "golden shore". You can also find kulta on (and possibly in) every bottle of Lapin Kulta beer and ranta whenever there's a place name featuring a beach. So, now you know some Finnish too!


There's also a large port and oil refinery, but they're all very neatly hidden away from the tourists.

If you want to go see Moomin World, you need to take a boat from the pier...


You can get there on the Moomin train.


Although it will stop at the Moomin shop.


For me, however, what I really need now is a clean set of clothes, and given a choice between Moomin clothes from Naantali and a more varied selection in Turku, I head to Turku.

Next post, Turku...

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Moomin train! I have just the icon for that. :)

It looks like you had better weather there than we did in London and Dorset.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Well, I had some wet days too, but the weather was pretty good all up.

I bought Liem a big Moomin comic book, so I guess I'll just have to wait and see if he likes it. My father gave us a great big Tintin book (in French) when I was quite young and I loved it, even though I couldn't read it.