DAY 25: Helsinki (NH Collection Grand Hansa Hotel)

Woke to a lovely Helsinki day, a clear sky and no snow.

We both felt a little under the weather, very tired and lethargic. I wonder if it's a hangover from whatever Jim had in Copenhagen?

We headed out for breakfast at the Old Market Hall. I think the Copenhagen Market is much better. This one seems to be 90% reindeer and fish and very Finnish food. I suppose it's hard to criticise a country for selling traditional food, but it would have been nice to have some alternatives. 

We had what we thought would be a fairly ordinary breakfast - coffee and scrambled eggs & avocado for Jim, and a poached egg with hummus and toast and avocado for me. Jim got served scrambled eggs in a bowl with a scoop of avocado on top. He had to pay extra to get toast. Mine was cold toast, cold hummus, cold avocado and a warm poached egg, all on top of each other. A very odd experience.

From there, we strolled along the harbour, looking at all the ferries and seeing where the water in various little inlets was actually starting to freeze!

We visited the Uspenski Cathedral, which is an absolutely enormous Orthodox Cathedral on top of a nearby hill. It's quite dramatic with lots of gold onion domes.

After we came out, Jim said no more cathedrals! (Although I quite like them.)

We came back to the hotel for a rest before heading out to have lunch at an Italian restaurant which got absolutely top ratings on Trip Advisor. We seemed to walk to ages to get there, and were bitterly disappointed. Perhaps Finnish people don't have good Italian restaurants to compare it to.

We shared an eggplant parmigiana for entree and then I had a carbonara and Jim had parpardelle with a wild boar ragu. We had to ask for bread - and got a couple of small soggy pieces of focaccia. The food was just okay, not terrible and not great. But certainly not worth traipsing through the snow for!

After that, we came back to the hotel and actually had a snooze. I woke feeling quite a bit better, so let's hope I'm getting over whatever it is.

At 8pm, we had a booking at the Kupoli Dome - which is a bar on the top floor of the hotel in a dome which gives you a 360 degree view of Helsinki. The hotel staff really talked it up and it was quite nice, but also quite pretentious and overpriced. We were given a little booklet with each cocktail explained - apparently they're a Nordic twist on normal cocktails - and with a drawing of each one too. They cost about 19 euro each ($30 AUD!) and even a glass of wine was the same price. I suppose we were paying for the view - which was only out of one window, so quite limited.

Afterwards, we went up some stairs to the outdoor area and walked around the dome in the biting cold to actually see the view properly. It was quite a nice experience, but not something we'd do again.