January 23–29: arrival in Helsinki
To start out: pictures from my arrival and first week in Helsinki.
The weird waiting tube at Heathrow, where I waited to board my flight to Helsinki. Oddly airplane-like itself.
First picture taken in Finland: my bedroom in the apartment on Katajanokka, Helsinki, my bed on the right. It was a rickety setup but turned out perfectly comfortable.
The view out to the balcony outside my bedroom and the courtyard beyond. These conditions (snowy, dark, and cloudy) typified the first week there.
Looking from the kitchen table into the living room through their glass partition.
First glimpse of the main building at Teknillinen Korkeakoulu, or TKK for short — in English, Helsinki University of Technology. It's actually in Espoo, though, not Helsinki proper; Espoo is another municipality to the west and northwest of Helsinki. This main building is one of Alvar Aalto's iconic designs (completed 1965), many more of which we would encounter over the course of the semester, to my continual delight.
The TKK chapel, a nice example of Finnish modernism, as demonstrated here by the skillful use of wood and daylight. It was designed by Heikki and Kaija Siren and built in 1957.
The rather compelling forward view in the chapel: its apse is the woods.
The bell tower of the chapel.
Helsingin Rautatieasema: the Helsinki central railway station, designed by Eliel Saarinen, its tower under renovation all through the semester, unfortunately.
View to the southwest from Torni, Helsinki's tallest building, out toward the sea.
View from Torni to, I think, the northeast.
This is from the walk along the north shore of Katajanokka. Katajanokka is an island to the east of downtown, but it's almost a peninsula, separated from the rest of the city only by a canal. Our apartment was at the eastern (i.e. outer) end. Further west is an area of older buildings in the typical fin-de-siècle style called Jugend, which is basically a toned-down Art Nouveau, and which I found quite lovely. Many of the Jugend buildings on Katajanokka have names; the round-tower building to the left here, for instance, is named Wellamo, and it hosts a restaurant of the same name in its ground floor.
View across the bay from the same area, toward the more northern parts of the city.
The acoustic treatment on the wall of the main chamber of Helsinki City Hall, which we toured.