The Finnish RailwayMuseum

Yesterday we visited the Finnish Railway Museum where was held open day. Free of entrance. It was very nice and interesting. The old steam locomotives are huge, impressive and beautiful. In the end of the 1950’s I went to school by train. Those steam locomotives were much smaller. But they only needed to pull a couple of wagons.

Below text is from their leaflet.

‘‘The Finnish Railway Museum, a national collection specializing in rail transport, is situated at Hyvinkää, about sixty kilometres from Helsinki. The museum presents the history of Finnish railways within the pleasing and authentic railway setting of the station and engine shed of the former Hyvinkää-Hanko Railway, a private line built in the 1870s. The permanent exhibition, concentrating on rail travel, locomotive and rolling stock development, and railway occupations, is spread out in the various buildings within the museum grounds. The buildings include three exhibition halls, engine roundhouse, station building and railwaymen’s barracks.”

Visiting both Seurasaari & Tamminiemi

Seurasaari/Fölisön is an open-air museum which celebrates its 110th anniversary this year. There are many old buildings transported to there from all around Finland. There are coffee shops, a museum shop and a church. There are held different events during the year. Workshops, events for children and Midsummer bonfire. Yesterday there was a crafts market. I can’t believe it’s 35 years since last time we visited the island.

After Seurasaari we went to visit Tamminiemi/Villa Ekudden which is situated close to Seurasaari. It was the residence of Finland’s presidents from 1940 – 1981. It became the Urho Kekkonen museum in 1987. He was the last president to live there. It was on our list of places to visit for many, many years. My husband have visited it a couple of times before but, yesterday was my first.

WeirdAntiques and The Lotta Museum

My husband has been talking about visiting the Weird Antiques for months. Yesterday we were there. A lot of stuff ! Old, cool, weird, second hand, vintage, movies, music . . . But, I didn’t shoot any of the weird stuff.

We noticed that the Lotta Museum is not far away. As we had planned to at some point go there, we thought it wise to do it right away. It was very interesting. Lot a nice old photos and old things. It hit us, we probably, after all, are a bit old. As so many things used in the 30’s and 40’s still were in use when we were kids.

Amos Rex Art Museum

Last Saturday the line to the new Amos Rex Art Museum was very long. As it was raining and we already were soaking wet we decided to postpone our visit there. On Wednesday the weather was great and went to visited it. The line was much shorter but still it took us 30 minutes in line.

This is what it says about it on Wikipedia:

“Massles, the first exhibition at the Amos Rex museum, is made by the Japanese collective teamLab. It consists of an immersive interactive art exhibition rich of colours and leaded by creativity. The viewers are encouraged to interact and explore with the surroundings giving rise to different results.”

It was different, interesting. Visitor’s drawings of crocodiles, lizards, butterflies, parrots, flowers flying, crawling, mowing, floating around all over.

A few snapshots at the The Helsinki International Christmas Market on the way to the car. 

@ the Maritime Museums

Here are some more photos from our tour to Turku/Åbo last Friday. There was a lot to see both at the Maritime museum and the ship S/S Bore. Bore nowadays is both a hostel and museum. The climb all the many, steep, narrow steps up to the museum part was pretty exhausting. But worth it. The view from the command bridge over Aura river is nice. When editing the photos at home I saw I unfortunately had cut the jib boom and the main mast when photographing the ship model of Herzogin Cecilie. A ship my father in law sailed in the end of the 20’s beginning of the 30’s.