Sue Lauther On The Move: Last Days of Helsinki: Porvoo and Museums

Benedicto:

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkey’s howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches where storms come and go as lightening clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you---beyond that next turning of the canyon walls. ---Edward Abbey (thanks Trudy Hall)

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Last Days of Helsinki: Porvoo and Museums

July 26-27

Pulpit with hour glasses

Tuesday was a museum day. We spent some time at the contemporary museum of art that had a large African exhibit. The one bit of dance I saw was a film by a Ugandan with voices of 3 presidents promising more freedom and opportunity for the people that never came. He was dancing in rubble: a large tube, mine-shaft opening, and dusty old construction site. Another artist that I liked documented sculpted hairstyles of women. There were braids drawn up into crowns, big bouffant hair, scarves in all sculptural forms, etc. Then we went to the historical museum that was like a maze in form; we thought we’d never get out. We started with pre-history (stones, graves, tools, lashings, etc.) to the stone-age, iron age, beautiful and basic other metal gear and ornament, the costumes, the furnishings, the weapons, the books, the rooms, the treasures, the harness’s and rakes that fiancées gave their wives to be, and finally doll houses big and small, stuffed and clean, horizontal and vertical.

Wednesday, we went to a quaint town named Porvoo that was about a 40-minute bus ride. We walked in the sun across the bridges, through the cemetery, around the historic church where there was a wedding and then later inside, between the cute colorful homes with communal garden areas, and had some coffee next to the red ochre painted river homes in a café that’s partially on a boat. After our walk-about, we got tickets on the passenger ferry back to Helsinki. It was a lovely four-hour ride, with the warm sun low in the sky, cool breeze, lots of birds and interesting buildings to spy with my binoculars, and a spot inside where Les could lie down and work out his cold.