Our overnight cruise ship arrived in port in Stockholm, Sweden early this morning. As we were there much too early to actually check into the hotel, we dropped off our luggage and ate a delicious and nourishing breakfast at a nearby McDonald's. Bad food notwithstanding, several of us decided to accompany Mark, our professor, around the city before going back to the hotel to check in. We did a full loop, crossing mostly through Gamla Stan, the Old Town, and the...

We arrived by train early last evening in Turku, Finland - the former capital city. After unloading our luggage at the hotel, Becky and I went for a walk around the city (actually, we were after food, but the restaurant was closed by the time we got there). The Aura river, which runs through the city, it is pretty gross during the day, but with all the city lights and lighted restaurant boats, is quite lovely at night. We ended up eating for dinner what takes ...

This morning our group went to go visit some Alvar Aalto architecture near the small town of Jyvaskyla. We hopped a bus to the nearby small town of Saynatsalo to see one of Aalto's more famous buildings, the Saynatsalo Town Hall. The Hall was very cool - built in 1952 after Aalto won a design contest for the project. Even today, over 50 years later, the building is still very functional and fits the needs of the community well. We then went on to visit Aalt...

This was our last day in Helsinki. We had a sort of free-day after checking out of the hotel, until 4, when we had to get on the train to Jyv skyl . We (Becky, Shandra, and I) went down to the street market and looked around, and since the weather was looking crummy (sunny and rain-free days in Finland are highly elusive things) we decided to go to the Lutheran Cathedral (again), took a more extensive look inside, and went down into the crypts, which, sadly, we...

Our third day of touring Helsinki went pretty uneventfully. We started out at the Rock Church, built in the 1960s, which was just a few blocks from our hotel. The church was built into the rockside in the center of several blocks of apartments, the interior was blasted out with dynamite, and the left-over rocks used to build the walls up above the rock; and the whole thing is topped off with a copper roof. We then headed out to a more residential part of town ...