The ground is a bit snowy but it didn’t snow today. I wasn’t actually too cold initially. We decided just to wander and see what we found. The shops and layout reminded me of Hong Kong.
We found a market square that sold flowers vegetable and fish. It was quite cold by the sea. Further wandering lead us to the Uspensky Orthodox Cathedral, built in 1868. It was quite Adams Family looking but the inside was filled with beautiful floor to ceiling paintings. It was very peaceful and warm.
We had seen a lot of pictures of the main cathedral, St Nicholas, in Senate Square and as it was quite tall we could follow the dome top as the wise men followed the star. The area in front of it was all whitish. The actual Cathedral looked big from the outside but was smaller than I expected inside. Again it was peaceful and warm.
Our adventure for the day involved taking a ferry to the Suomenlinna Sueaborg Fortress. It is the biggest sea fortress in Scandinavia founded in 1748. The purpose of the fortress was to curb Russian expansion. Sueaborg is the Swedish name for Finland, as it was originally part of Sweden. During the Finnish civil war it served as a prison.
It is now listed as a Unesco World Heritage site. It was very deserted and being so close to Christmas everything bar a dairy was closed. We walked the whole length of the island very gingerly, as it was extremely icy. It was very old fashioned with many guns remaining put. It seemed untamed and we hardly saw any other people. We saw a large submarine.
Windy was definitely my description of the weather here. It was freezing and we were both ready for home. Unfortunately the main quay was at the other end about 30 minutes away. So off we trudged.
Once back on the mainland we went through an indoor market hall. This made more sense to me than having one of these stalls outside. While making our way back to the hotel we stopped off for a Big Mac and McFish, well how could we not? I thought it was much better than UK McDonalds -more like NZ Fillet o’ fish. So ‘m now contemplating a 5:15 start tomorrow morning, that’s 3:15am London time. Oh my God!
The tops of my legs are still quite cold even though we’ve been back for at least an hour. We still have to go out for dinner again.
Later
Well we never made it back out instead we tried out our luck at the casino again. We both played Roulette and Gavin did heaps better. I went quite well for a while, but enviably we lost it all. The slot machines also went well for a while.