Day 9 Part 1 - Helsinki

There's no testing the water here. We dove right into the city, splitting the city center into quarters. The eighteen of us broke into four groups and each took a quarter of the city to walk around, observe and document for four hours. I had the top left quarter with Leto, Aswin, Jo and Jess.

Leto and I took the coastal area, beginning with the edge of the industrial section at the bottom of the quarter, then north through the cemetery.

We started walking from the bottom right corner of our section. We noticed as we got closer to the harbor that the amount of construction dramatically increased. Helsinki seems to be growing rapidly at the edges, and is very unlike Reykjavik, whose buildings seems to be frozen in the 1960s.

It's difficult to perceive the topography of Helsinki right away, but there are definitely changes in grade, hills and slopes. Rather than carve into the landscape, Helsinki moves with it, although there are some moments of cutting where different modes of transportation pass over or under each other.

This photo is of a pedestrian underpass. The highway above defines the edge between the dense city and the more scenic cemetery.

I wish there were an easier way to document sounds. There is video, of course, but that in itself is pretty limiting. It's easy to draw, take photos and gather pamphlets, fliers and postcards. It's difficult to record a sound unless you're very quick, or very lucky. Just after this photo was taken, two boys on skateboards rode past us down the path. Their skateboards clattered noisily over the brick, the sound of which reverberated endlessly against the glass and concrete enclosure.

Helsinki's citizens share one large, collective cemetery on the western edge of the city. I'm not sure if the cemetery itself is sectioned off and if it is, according to what criteria. To Leto and I, the cemetery was a literal city for the dead, with endless rows of densely packed gravestones. The weather was absolutely beautiful, as it has been for the entire duration of the trip thus far. The sunlight streamed through the trees, filling the space beneath the canopy with a lovely glow.

Unlike the cemeteries I'm used to, which are solemn and elicit voices no higher than a whisper, Helsinki's was full of activity and bustle. Joggers and bikers used the road that separated the cemetery's edge from the water, mothers pushed strollers, sometimes accompanied by older children. We turned off the road and walked through the cemetery towards the main church. We stood on the front steps, turned away from the doors and saw, about 200 meters down a path, a beach!  Notwithstanding Leto and I thought it was certainly not beach weather, the sight of families laughing and playing at the edge of a cemetery caught me off guard. Surely a cemetery was a place of quiet and reservation?

It's evident that Finns have a special relationship with their departed, and the nature of that relationship is to keep them close and part of their activities. By no means would I say Finns are obsessed or overly conscious of the dead, but if I may draw connections on mere observation (we didn't talk to anyone, regretfully), Finns treat their capital's cemetery as a place to be shared by the living and the dead.

This is a two-part post! Stay tuned for more from my first full day in Helsinki!