A Day in the Capital

Saturday was all blue skies when we woke up early to head to Helsinki for a few hours. It seems like the weekends are nice, reminiscent of summertime, which is a great thing here.

We drove an hour or so towards Helsinki and stopped at a mall to park the car and then we would take a subway into the city center.

We stopped at the mall and looked around a little bit, because it was so deserted even though it was about 9am. After that, we went down to the metro/subway station and took the final ride into town. It took only a few minutes to reach where we wanted to go.

Our main purpose of going to Helsinki was because of an exhibition going on in Helsinki, but first we took a short detour around the streets and had a snack in a coffee shop before going to the museum.

 The Ateneum Museum of Art in Helsinki is currently having a huge exhibition with over 300 works of Helene Schjerfbeck. Who is Helene Schjerfbeck? She is one of the most famous women artists from the 19th century and Finland's most profound, well-known artist.
There were so many people there in the exhibit that it was pretty hard to get a good look at things unless you wanted to stand there for a long time. We moved pretty quickly through her works, glancing from afar and saw her most famous paintings so that was really cool.
Unfortunately everywhere in the museum, photos weren't allowed so I can't post any pictures of the paintings. We also looked at the other collections of which were all from other Finnish artists.
I saw Ferinand von Wright's famous painting "Taistelevat metsot" and works by Hugo Simberg (the same artist who painted the Tampere Cathedral), including his famous painting "Haavoittunut enkeli." One other artist I really took notice too was Akseli Gallen-Kallela. As it turns out, he was part of the Taos community of artists for several years and thus there were even some pictures of his which were of the Taos Pueble. It was really unexpected to see and read that he had gone to New Mexico. Small world, right?

The museum was pretty nice to see and I especially enjoyed getting to see some of the other collections. After that we walked around the city a bit more and then a few streets ahead the white catherdral that overlooks the bay in Helsinki came into view and that was when I really knew and felt; this. is. Helsinki. 

We walked around the square and harbor before having lunch and returning home. It was a great day in the capital with fantastic weather, too bad it couldn't have lasted longer. Now, until next time.