That next morning we stopped and had our passports checked and stamped a couple times before completing the drive to Helsinki. Other than a bus tour around the city, stuffing ourselves with as much pizza as we possibly could for 8 Euros a person, and some strolling around the city, we didn’t do much before hopping back on the bus and driving to Turku, Finland’s old capitol. Before boarding our ship in Turku, we stopped at this old church:
I loved the lighting outside when we were in the area out front of the church that evening. It was that kind of golden sunshine that reminds you you're still alive and that winter will one day hide its head for a while, even though your fingers are currently hurting from the cold.
After our ferry over to Sweden to spend two days in Stockholm (which waits for another post), we returned to Helsinki. We dropped our stuff off in a locker and then, bound and determined to go to the temple, about ten of the other girls and I squashed into a big cab and handed the driver the temple address.
I love the temple- the Helsinki temple, the D.C. temple, the Salt Lake temple, the Detroit temple, any true temple of God. It doesn't matter where in the world, I simply love the temple.Getting to go and do ordinances for the dead (which may sound weird, but are actually super cool and not really weird at all) at the Helsinki temple was definitely the highlight of the trip for me. The temple is so beautiful and just SO peaceful. Temples really are the Houses of the Lord.
Curious about what LDS temples are or what goes on in them? Check out these links:
The Helsinki isn't actually in the city of Helsinki. It's just outside of it, on a hill in a lovely, wooded area.
After our time in the temple, we hopped on a bus and headed back into the center of Helsinki to do some more exploring and wandering around. I really enjoyed getting to see this reindeer that we found outside of a souvenir shop:
To bad it's really hard to beat a stuffed reindeer at a staring constest...
After a full day of going to the temple, eating even more pizza at the same place we'd gone before, and seeing about all there is to see in Helsinki as a tourist, we trekked along the bay through the cold to catch our ferry to Estonia... or so we thought we thought.
We noticed something was wrong when two of the girls in our group got kicked out of the bathrooms in the ferry station by security guards. A few minutes after the confusing bathroom incident, the security guards came down to where our group was and started talking to us angrilly in Finnish. Luckilly, one of them realized we only spoke English and started to explain to us that the ferry station was closing and that we needed to leave. In confusion, one of our head teachers explained that we were there to catch the night ferry Tallinn and showed him our tickets. The tickets said that the ferry was for 11.30 and the lady at the ticket office that morning had made it sound like they were for that night. Apparently, though not to my utter surprise since much of the world runs on a 24 hour clock and not a 12 hour one, they were actually for 11.30 am that day. We had missed our ferry by over ten hours.
The security guards couldn't just let us hang out in the station while we figured out what to do, so we relocated to the steps outside. There we were, about a dozen and a half college-aged girls and four college-aged guys, standing on the steps outside the ferry station with all of our bags and no place to stay as the snow came down. I'm sure we were quite the sight. Some girls were really angry and freaking out, one or two girls cried, one one girl pretended to do the haka, some of us laughed and watched as the one girl pretended to do the haka, and our head-teachers and a teacher with a laptop desperately searched the web for nearby hostels with enough space for all of us. Thank Heavens, it was probably only a half an hour before we had reservations at a hostel about two blocks away that one of the boys had ran over to to investigate for us.
I never thought I'd be happy about missing a boat, but that night I was quite happy and felt very blessed that we'd missed our boat. If we hadn't misread the time on our tickets and had actually made the ferry that morning, we wouldn't have gotten to go to the temple. The temple was totally worth missing our boat. We were able to find a hostel for close by for cheap that night, refund our tickets and get on the morning ferry to Tallinn the very next day, and still have almost a full day in Tallinn before getting on our scheduled bus to Riga that next night. Coincidence and luck? I think not. Blessings? Yes, I know it.
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