Three weeks tour of Russia and parts of Scandinavia

Just back from a three week – marathon trip of four cities over three countries with my Parents, Sister, Uncle, Aunt and Cousins (9 of us). From Amsterdam I flew to Moscow to unite with them and on the same day we caught a train to Saint Petersburg to reach there by late evening. Spend two days in this grand city and then caught another train to Helsinki.

After half a day of sightseeing in the Finnish capital we boarded a cruise to Stockholm. Early next morning we landed in this beautiful archipelago city where we spend one and a half days before it was time to get back on the Cruise to where we came from – Helsinki. Sadly was only able to spend yet another half day at Helsinki exploring some great architecture by the Finnish master – Alvar Aalto – before I had to get on my last long trip - a train journey to Moscow.

After all that adrenalin from travelling soo much... seeing many great museums, churches and a bit too many palaces, I needed to slow down two gears and catch my breath before I could soak in this might city. But finally I had the time to do that and in fact more. I had more than two weeks to see it all in the only city in the world that has ever really challenged New York to the title - ‘Citiest city of all’!

Besides being a freak of Architecture, Art and Nature and as you might have guessed travelling, it’s next to impossible for me not to record every interesting thing I see. My desire to click photos (millions of them) is almost pathological now. And almost nobody I know has thanked the inventors of digital cameras as much as me : )

It would therefore be a mammoth task for me to try and blog all the significant stuff I have seen on this trip. So I shall only blog the most amazing, dearest or inspiring of all and as for the rest I will resort to the easiest way out – online photo albums. Anyways as the old saying goes “Pictures speak a thousand words”.

So here I start city by city –

Helsinki, Finland

Two days in Helsinki is surely not enough if you want to soak in all the great architecture here! The city hosts some of the best known works of the architectural legend from Finland – Alvar Aalto – which itself will consume more than that much time. But while in Helsinki besides an ambitious plan to see all of Aalto’s key projects within the city I also wanted to see some contemporary projects. And high on this second list was the Museum of Contemporary Arts designed by Steven Holl – the reason being a simple nostalgic one - for early in my second year of Architectural education back in Mumbai (along with a few of my classmates) I was given the task of building a physical model of this project to study how the design/materials and colours of building where effecting it’s internal light quality, I just had to see how close I was to the real experience. Here are some comparative photos of my model and the ‘real thing’.

Quiet close right! : )

As for my Alvar Aalto tour – to my bad luck the day I had allotted to a major chuck of his work happened to be a Monday (unfortunately the one day of the week that most of his projects now turned museums are closed). But nonetheless I got some nice views from the outside. Here’s one image each per project –

His own house

His Studio

However, I was a lot luckier with his auditoriums – I managed a decent guided tour of

the Finlandia Hall

and a lucky tour on my own of the House of Culture.

I have added many more images of these and other projects by Aalto, along with other photos from the city in the web album embedded below.

Photos from Helsinki

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