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 

May 24 Parnu, Estonia

 Another cold and overcast day with light rain in the afternoon. We decided to walk to the beach, which unsurpringly empty. But the walk was through beautiful parklands.

Lookout near the harbour

In the afternoon we walked into town where there was a Saturday Street Food festival in progress. Lots of yummy treats. Then it was the Parnu Museum with exhibits dating back 8000 years as well as a display of national costumes over time.

8000 year old pendant portraying a person, originally thought to be woman and called Madonna but later opinion is that it's a man.

Fire truck

Sun dial

property 

Rooster from the top of tgecspire on St Nicolas Church which was destroyed by the Soviets. The rooster was taken by a family and buried to stop the Soviets from destroying it. It was discovered some 50 years later when the property owner was digging in his backyard.

Traditional dress from a the area 

Red Tower - the only remnant of the city wall.

May 23 Riga - Parnu

 A 3 hour bus ride today through light rain to the premier beach resort of Estonia. Unfortunately rain and 12 degree temperatures don’t make the beach very attractive, though it didn’t stop a yacht club from running a race on the estuary just across from our door.

May 22 Riga

 Today we embarked on a tour of the Art Nouveau quarter of Riga, just north of the old city. Beautiful architecture and furnishings from the turn of the 19th century. We started at the Art Nouveau Centre which is an apartment fitted out to replicate one form c.1903. 

   

 

Th streets next to this Art Nouveau Centre have a number of stunning examples of this style of architecture. Here are a few of them.

    

    

Here are some photos of the details in the mouldings on the walls.

May 21 Riga, Latvia

 Our day started with a visit to the city markets, just outside the Old Town. Fish aplenty, both fresh and dried. Then cheeses and smallgoods, then fruit and vegetables and flowers. Most people live in apartments and can’t grow their own flowers so the market provides them in large numbers.

Dried fish of various types.

We then walked back to the Old Town to the House of the Black Heads. This was a trade guild back in the 14th century - made up of unmarried merchants, shipowners and foreigners. It began as a military society but later transitioned to a purely social organisation. It continued to meet until 1940. The building was destroyed by German bombs in 1941 and further damaged by the soviets in 1948 but was reconstructed in the late 1990s to its previous glory. 

 

House of the Blackheads

Riga Town Hall

   

St John’s Lutheran Church

   

St Mary’s church

Holy Saviour Anglican Church

Big Christopher, legendary founder of the city. 

Vans Bridge

Riga Cathedral

An old wagon and barrels sitting outside a beer hall

Three Brothers - 3 houses built at different times and in different styles 

but examples of the oldest dwellings in the city