Helsinki

 At 5:30 on the morning of Thursday, August 3rd, we checked out of Hotel Bristol and walked down to Oslo Sentral Station, to catch the 5:54 train to the airport.  We used the Vy app to buy senior tickets on the regular local train, rather than the highly-advertised Flytoget express train, which costs a lot more and takes only a few minutes less.  We took the 8:35 Finnair flight to Helsinki, arriving around 10:55, and caught the train (using only my Visa card, no ticket) to Central Station.  Since I hadn't activated roaming data, I had to rely on my memory as to the route to Hotel Indigo Boulevard.  My memory proved faulty, so we wandered around some before pulling out the Rick Steves book and using the map.

Our room wasn't ready, so we left our luggage and went to the old market hall, at the harbor, by way of the Esplanade, a park that runs several blocks west from the market.  There was a jazz concert going on there.  We stopped to listen a little, but were hungry, so we went on to the market hall, built in 1888.  We hoped to get some salmon soup from Soup and More, but they were out of it.  When Mary Joy asked if they could recommend somewhere else, they pointed to Scandinavia Cafe, right across the aisle, so we went there and had a wonderful salmon soup.

After checking into our hotel, we went, in the rain, to the Design Museum, which was interesting.  Finland is famous for design.  Our hotel was in the Design District, and Mary Joy did a lot of window shopping, particularly at the clothes shops.

Across from the museum was St. John's Lutheran Church, so we looked in there, before heading back to the hotel.

We had dinner reservations at Nolla, just around the corner and down the street from our hotel.  We chose the fixed-price menu, and this ended up as the priciest (and maybe the best) meal on the trip.