May 26 Helsinki

 Back in Helsinki to a beautiful, if not particularly warm, day. The city library is an expansive building that looks like a ship or a spacecraft, located just across the road from the parliament building, the City Music Centre and the Kiasma Museum of Modern Art.

City library

Parliament House

  

Kiasma Museum of Modern Art

The sculpture in the pond is named "Women & Children" and is made up of found bronze sculptures, with water streaming from their eyes symbolising seeing or perception: they see us as we watch them. The intention is to create an interplay between agency and vulnerability.

The Helsinki Music Centre is another wonderful building where an International Violin competition is currently in progress. We were able to join a lecture on the Stradivari and other related violins with Peter Livonen, Concert Master of the Paris Opera Orchestra and previous winner of this Violin Competition, demonstrating the sound of a Stradivari, a Guadagnini and another 18th century French violin to the same design as the Stradivari.

Sculpture, “The Song Trees”, inspired by a folk tale of a giant pike that came out of the sea and began to sing and all the birds around were silent.

Cloakroom in the Music Centre. Everyone wears thick cloaks in winter so the cloakroom 

for a concert hall is 5 times or more than anything we’d find in Australia.

Sculpture inside the centre

Climate change protest on the Main Street of Helsinki