Showing posts with label Finland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Finland. Show all posts
Sunday, September 24, 2017
092417B
Priceless
box of red beans and rice
Zatarains to Finland
imitation cajun goodness
childhood comfort
not in grocery stores there
if you can believe it
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Finland pt 2
Part 2
One day we walked along the River Aura, which bisects the town. There's a path/boardwalk, which lies at the bottom of a pretty steep slope. We made it down to the riverside path and proceeded upstream, which was also the way towards Morgan and Wax's apartment. There was not much action on the river. A few ducks; no boat traffic. Still, there were wildflowers, and the rolling was easy, until the path ended in steps. We retraced our way and continued along the river on the lowest street. After a short while we came to the top of the flight of steps. The riverside path continued at the bottom of another steep ramp. At this point we realized we were no more than three blocks from Morgan and Wax 's apartment. They had feared we couldn't make the trip on our own. 9 blocks. With 1 turn. Sigh. I did help Sheila push. The riverside path started right up again, at the bottom of a short sharp slope. L8r, we walked that segment with Morgan.
I'd imagined the corner store smaller than it is. We liked buying pastries, & not just for the obvious reason. You put your choice on a scale & press the numbered button corresponding to the item. The machine prints out a label with price, etc. If you want diversity, items w different code #s get weighed separately. It was possible to buy bad bread, I suppose, but why wld u?
One day we took a taxi out to the archipelago, which is exactly what it sounds like. We went to a park, which is sort of like a state or national park in the US. There is no gate where you have to pay, but there is a big parking lot. Near it are three old wooden buildings. In front of them are some wooden picnic tables and a couple of wooden more or less life-size animals for kids to play on. I couldn't go into any of the buildings, but I do know that one of them is a café where you buy lunch. They have drinks there, and I guess some food, but if you order a meal they give you a ticket that you take to the next building. This place sells smoked fish plates, which contain, besides the fish, new potatoes, what passes for salad in Finland (mostly just arugula), and I think there was something else. Apparently there are some shepherds who herd sheep the way Vikings did (when they weren't pillaging or maybe after they retired from seafaring) but the path was too rough and no one wanted to push my wheelchair there. Plus, the kids wanted to go swimming. Did I mention the kids? This is where we met Wax's two brothers and their families. Martin, Leena, and baby Sofia couldn't stay; they had a 5 Hour Drive back home to some place inland in south-central Finland I gather. Now why did Dragon capitalize hour and drive; is 5 Hour Drive a rock band? The world may never know, but I digress. (Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the Voice recognition software I use, and if there are any typos in this sentence I'm not fixing them. Program should work better.) Mece, Tina, six-year old Carmela, and three-year-old Leon, Loke, and Ciara stayed more or less the rest of the day. Yes, triplets. We took a steep and harrowing path to a small artificial beach. Had the sand not been dumped there, the shore would probably have consisted of partially lithified mud. One might have imagined one was on the shore of an artificial lake, perhaps a reservoir, in the United States, and not a particularly large one. The other side, close enough that we would have been able to tell whether there were nude sunbathers (there weren't) was actually another island. You're looking at an arm of the sea, albeit a brackish one. The kids went swimming au naturel. No one else in our party was inclined to do that. Some other people we didn't know showed up; they had swimsuits under their clothes.
We drove to the town of Pargas and ate lunch at the only restaurant, attached to the only hotel. It was very nice. Sheila and I shared an entrée, so it wasn't fish. We also shared an appetizer; nine different kinds of seafood: Yum! Carmela was obsessed with the roses.
After lunch we walked to the limestone quarry that is clearly the only significant employer in the town. It's big, one of the biggest in the world. We were all suitably impressed with a hole enough to drop a few dozen small islands into.
One day we walked along the River Aura, which bisects the town. There's a path/boardwalk, which lies at the bottom of a pretty steep slope. We made it down to the riverside path and proceeded upstream, which was also the way towards Morgan and Wax's apartment. There was not much action on the river. A few ducks; no boat traffic. Still, there were wildflowers, and the rolling was easy, until the path ended in steps. We retraced our way and continued along the river on the lowest street. After a short while we came to the top of the flight of steps. The riverside path continued at the bottom of another steep ramp. At this point we realized we were no more than three blocks from Morgan and Wax 's apartment. They had feared we couldn't make the trip on our own. 9 blocks. With 1 turn. Sigh. I did help Sheila push. The riverside path started right up again, at the bottom of a short sharp slope. L8r, we walked that segment with Morgan.
I'd imagined the corner store smaller than it is. We liked buying pastries, & not just for the obvious reason. You put your choice on a scale & press the numbered button corresponding to the item. The machine prints out a label with price, etc. If you want diversity, items w different code #s get weighed separately. It was possible to buy bad bread, I suppose, but why wld u?
One day we took a taxi out to the archipelago, which is exactly what it sounds like. We went to a park, which is sort of like a state or national park in the US. There is no gate where you have to pay, but there is a big parking lot. Near it are three old wooden buildings. In front of them are some wooden picnic tables and a couple of wooden more or less life-size animals for kids to play on. I couldn't go into any of the buildings, but I do know that one of them is a café where you buy lunch. They have drinks there, and I guess some food, but if you order a meal they give you a ticket that you take to the next building. This place sells smoked fish plates, which contain, besides the fish, new potatoes, what passes for salad in Finland (mostly just arugula), and I think there was something else. Apparently there are some shepherds who herd sheep the way Vikings did (when they weren't pillaging or maybe after they retired from seafaring) but the path was too rough and no one wanted to push my wheelchair there. Plus, the kids wanted to go swimming. Did I mention the kids? This is where we met Wax's two brothers and their families. Martin, Leena, and baby Sofia couldn't stay; they had a 5 Hour Drive back home to some place inland in south-central Finland I gather. Now why did Dragon capitalize hour and drive; is 5 Hour Drive a rock band? The world may never know, but I digress. (Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the Voice recognition software I use, and if there are any typos in this sentence I'm not fixing them. Program should work better.) Mece, Tina, six-year old Carmela, and three-year-old Leon, Loke, and Ciara stayed more or less the rest of the day. Yes, triplets. We took a steep and harrowing path to a small artificial beach. Had the sand not been dumped there, the shore would probably have consisted of partially lithified mud. One might have imagined one was on the shore of an artificial lake, perhaps a reservoir, in the United States, and not a particularly large one. The other side, close enough that we would have been able to tell whether there were nude sunbathers (there weren't) was actually another island. You're looking at an arm of the sea, albeit a brackish one. The kids went swimming au naturel. No one else in our party was inclined to do that. Some other people we didn't know showed up; they had swimsuits under their clothes.
We drove to the town of Pargas and ate lunch at the only restaurant, attached to the only hotel. It was very nice. Sheila and I shared an entrée, so it wasn't fish. We also shared an appetizer; nine different kinds of seafood: Yum! Carmela was obsessed with the roses.
After lunch we walked to the limestone quarry that is clearly the only significant employer in the town. It's big, one of the biggest in the world. We were all suitably impressed with a hole enough to drop a few dozen small islands into.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Finland trip, part 1
Two week vacation in Finland, July 16 through 31st, 2010
We flew out of Birmingham, Alabama to Detroit, and then to Amsterdam, and finally to Helsinki. The third of these three flights was the most memorable, for two reasons. I could see out the window, and saw lots of quaint rural landscapes in Finland and, before then, probably Denmark. Were importantly, I felt very sick on the flight from Amsterdam. Perhaps it was the low cabin pressure. As soon as we got to cruising altitude I began to feel extremely cold. I also sweated a lot, a sure sign in me of physical distress. As soon as we began to descend towards Earth, I started to feel better. By the time I was off the plane I felt almost normal.
Coming in to the Amsterdam airport I felt well enough to look out the window at the quaint and barely terrestrial countryside. I did not see any traditional wooden windmills, but I saw plenty of high tech energy generating turbines. The Amsterdam Airport had a wonderful fountain. It was about chest height on me and perhaps 5 m across. It was dotted with water nozzles, and at nonrandom but highly variable intervals the nozzles shot water up and towards the center the fountain, or not. When the water stopped coming out of a particular nozzle the water it had already disgorged, arced away from the nozzle and to the center of the fountain like a happy fish.
Sheila has posted a few pictures from the trip on her Picasa webpage (http://picasaweb.google.com/dragonteaster/FinlandPargasVikingPark725# the longest of three albums so far), and there will be more. Lillian has posted a couple of hundred on Facebook and Morgan posted some on her photo blog.
When we got off the plane in Helsinki, one of the people who took me off in the aisle chair took us straight to customs and then baggage claim. From there, he took us out to the taxi stand. This was both nice and efficient, although it meant we had missed the opportunity to get some euros for our dollars, which meant it was not easy to tip him or anyone else. Fortunately, in most situations in Finland, one does not tip. We had understood that it would be child's play to get a wheelchair-accessible taxi at the airport. It wasn't that easy but he made a couple of calls after a while and eventually one showed up.
When we got to the train station, it wasn't easy to figure out what track to go to, even though there was some English on one of the signs. We had to take all of our stuff down in an elevator and then drag it pretty far down the track to where the train was going to stop. The trains don't always stop in the same place, but we figured out where most of them stop and that's where we went. Every train we saw on that track had a wheelchair accessible car, the second to last car in the train. We didn't see any other disabled people get on a train, but we did see a train employee looking around and we assumed such a person would help us. That was the case. Who knows how long it would have taken if Sheila had had to put all of our stuff on the train by herself! There were two wheelchair spaces on the train. I occupied one and a large stroller occupied the other. The trip to Turku was about two hours and nearly all of our route was rural. We saw a lot of conifers and a couple of lumberyards. That, at least, was very reminiscent of Alabama. We were struck by how well to where most of the buildings we saw. They all looked like the head and improves and new paint jobs. We figured maybe they have to have that after what happens to them during the winter.
We stopped at the Turku train station, and looking out the window we could see Morgan and Wax in front of the station house and heading towards our track. They got to the train before we were finished getting off, and helped us take all of our stuff to the other side of the station. The train station isn't really very far from our hotel, and Morgan & Lillian pushed me. I didn't get a very clear idea of the layout of the town on our way to the Holiday Inn (an excellent place for someone in a wheelchair to stay, see my hotel review elsewhere).
The hotel cost €106 a night, which seems like a reasonable price for a downtown hotel only about four blocks from the city center. I didn't realize how good a deal we got. The hotel provided an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet that, based on prices for restaurant food around town, was probably worth about €25 a person to us. Most days we only ate two meals.
The days are already getting confused in my mind, but I do recall that our daughters refused to give us directions to the apartment. They have the ridiculous idea that because we sometimes forget things we can't find our way around a city, most of whose streets form a rectangular grid, when we only have about 9 blocks to go, and there is only one place where we turn from one street to another. So that first day we took a taxi to the apartment, after waiting until an hour when they might be awake.
Morgan and Wax have a small apartment consisting of a living room, bedroom, kitchen, shower and laundry room, bathroom, and, of course, a sauna.These rooms are all pretty small, and the living room seemed even smaller because Lillian was sleeping on a portable bed occupying most of the middle. The corner grocery, a half a block away, is very convenient. It seems to be what you would get if you took a full sized supermarket and removed three quarters of every aisle, or maybe 4/5s.
Morgan has already blogged about the sequence of our activities while we were in Finland, and it would be pointless for me to try to do the same. Instead, I'll just talk about my impressions of various things we did and saw.
Ice cream. Probably because their summer is so short many Finns seem to feel that a summer day without ice cream is a day wasted. Moving and stationary ice cream trucks and ice cream stands are everywhere and so are people carrying ice cream cones. I think every place that sells food sells ice cream. Of course our summer is about seven months long, so we have plenty of time for eating ice cream, and it doesn't seem that special. When your typical summer lasts only a few weeks and temperatures almost never get out of the 70s, ice cream takes on all the permanence of a mayfly.
Of course, this summer was the hottest in 75 years. All those sweaters, jackets, long pants, flannel shirts, that we brought for the nights during which the temperature would dip down into the 50s, went unused. But people got to have their ice cream.
The town square contains a market for six days a week, at least in summertime. The central part is dominated by a farmer's market, which includes a fishmonger. Around the outside are all sorts of booths: ice cream, T-shirts, imported clothing from India, yard sale stuff, a traveling used bookstore. Everything is on deliberately rough fake cobblestones. They are stone all right, but they are rectangular and cut to a brick shape. Traveling in a manual wheelchair on this stuff is exhausting. We bought a small wooden platter, a t-shirt, and some peas. Finns snack on 'em. You see the hulls on the ground everywhere, even indoors, but these are English peas. They're not sweet, they are chalky. My God, somebody needs to introduce these people to sugar snap or snow peas. I think they would even grow there. I saw some used paperback English-language science fiction in the square, including some books I have been meaning to read. I didn't buy them because I had enough reading material with me. The yard sales were just like they would have been if they were in the front yard. We could've picked up some inexpensive dishes. They didn't match our dining room.
We went to the old market twice. It is similar to the market in the square, but it is inside an old brick building. There are two or three butchers, two or three bakers, some touristy stuff, a café, a toy store, and more. We bought a few things there, but not the 200 pound teddy bear. It sure was astounding. I enjoyed the Nordic Engrish. My memory doesn't bring any of it up right now, but it was ubiquitous. Explanatory signs were particularly amusing.
Curb cuts in Turku are either very good or abominable. The former are designed intentionally as smooth and gentle ramps. The latter are rectangular solids of granite, 4 inches high, that have been roughly sawed off at a 45° angle. I actually have encountered a worse curb cut on the University of Alabama campus. That one is sawn asphalt, with a 1 inch lip. Followed by a 3 inch wide gutter and a 3 inch lip up. It has "wheel trap" written all over it.
We took a taxi up the hill to the art museum. It isn't really far, but the way is too steep for anyone to push me. It may be too steep for me to go in my power wheelchair. I had to use to lift us to see the art museum. It's not very big. There was a pretty substantial exhibit of Finnish paintings (and a bit of sculpture and printing) of nature and mostly rural life covering a good bit of Finnish art history. I assume there were pieces of art made by those who lived in what is now Finland before they called themselves Finns, but none of that stuff was included in the exhibit. I enjoyed the exhibit. There were a lot of Impressionist paintings, some of which appealed to untutored me. The other exhibit in the museum consisted of huge pieces of wood possibly shaped with a chain saw and painted in black, red, and at least one other color I think. The pieces were all three-dimensional, but gave an impression of being deeper than they really were. Some of them almost looked like they were two-dimensional representations of deep three-dimensional objects. I really did not like the show. I was not impressed with any emotional content of the work, probably because of my ignorance again. I did like the play with perspective, because it was done well. Pushing me back downhill, to Morgan's favorite restaurant was without incident. Turku was spared tabloid headlines about aerial wheelchairs.
The 13th century cathedral began with a leisurely stroll across the river and up the path to the accessible door. Oh wait, that was just me. For some of the other people there was a grueling climb shoving me up a steep gravel driveway that was clearly intended for vehicles moving under their own power. Again, no tabloid headlines were enabled, and I thought the interior of the cathedral was well worth the effort. The sarcophagi of knights, the knights themselves reproduced in carved stone on the lids, the painted ceilings, the reliquary that was easily large enough to hold an entire saint, but which was reportedly empty, the blaring organ music, combined with architectural details too numerous to mention or even recall, made the cathedral one of the high points of the tourist part of our visit
A very nice-looking antique store was right across the street from our hotel. We didn't really want to buy anything there, but we both wanted to explore it. Somehow we never made it, partly because Sheila was pretty sure I would not fit in the aisles. Just remember, when it comes to my wheelchair, I force it to fit. Ask the employees of Books A Million. They didn't believe me. WHY didn't they believe me!? Then again, maybe that was one of the reasons too.
We flew out of Birmingham, Alabama to Detroit, and then to Amsterdam, and finally to Helsinki. The third of these three flights was the most memorable, for two reasons. I could see out the window, and saw lots of quaint rural landscapes in Finland and, before then, probably Denmark. Were importantly, I felt very sick on the flight from Amsterdam. Perhaps it was the low cabin pressure. As soon as we got to cruising altitude I began to feel extremely cold. I also sweated a lot, a sure sign in me of physical distress. As soon as we began to descend towards Earth, I started to feel better. By the time I was off the plane I felt almost normal.
Coming in to the Amsterdam airport I felt well enough to look out the window at the quaint and barely terrestrial countryside. I did not see any traditional wooden windmills, but I saw plenty of high tech energy generating turbines. The Amsterdam Airport had a wonderful fountain. It was about chest height on me and perhaps 5 m across. It was dotted with water nozzles, and at nonrandom but highly variable intervals the nozzles shot water up and towards the center the fountain, or not. When the water stopped coming out of a particular nozzle the water it had already disgorged, arced away from the nozzle and to the center of the fountain like a happy fish.
Sheila has posted a few pictures from the trip on her Picasa webpage (http://picasaweb.google.com/dragonteaster/FinlandPargasVikingPark725# the longest of three albums so far), and there will be more. Lillian has posted a couple of hundred on Facebook and Morgan posted some on her photo blog.
When we got off the plane in Helsinki, one of the people who took me off in the aisle chair took us straight to customs and then baggage claim. From there, he took us out to the taxi stand. This was both nice and efficient, although it meant we had missed the opportunity to get some euros for our dollars, which meant it was not easy to tip him or anyone else. Fortunately, in most situations in Finland, one does not tip. We had understood that it would be child's play to get a wheelchair-accessible taxi at the airport. It wasn't that easy but he made a couple of calls after a while and eventually one showed up.
When we got to the train station, it wasn't easy to figure out what track to go to, even though there was some English on one of the signs. We had to take all of our stuff down in an elevator and then drag it pretty far down the track to where the train was going to stop. The trains don't always stop in the same place, but we figured out where most of them stop and that's where we went. Every train we saw on that track had a wheelchair accessible car, the second to last car in the train. We didn't see any other disabled people get on a train, but we did see a train employee looking around and we assumed such a person would help us. That was the case. Who knows how long it would have taken if Sheila had had to put all of our stuff on the train by herself! There were two wheelchair spaces on the train. I occupied one and a large stroller occupied the other. The trip to Turku was about two hours and nearly all of our route was rural. We saw a lot of conifers and a couple of lumberyards. That, at least, was very reminiscent of Alabama. We were struck by how well to where most of the buildings we saw. They all looked like the head and improves and new paint jobs. We figured maybe they have to have that after what happens to them during the winter.
We stopped at the Turku train station, and looking out the window we could see Morgan and Wax in front of the station house and heading towards our track. They got to the train before we were finished getting off, and helped us take all of our stuff to the other side of the station. The train station isn't really very far from our hotel, and Morgan & Lillian pushed me. I didn't get a very clear idea of the layout of the town on our way to the Holiday Inn (an excellent place for someone in a wheelchair to stay, see my hotel review elsewhere).
The hotel cost €106 a night, which seems like a reasonable price for a downtown hotel only about four blocks from the city center. I didn't realize how good a deal we got. The hotel provided an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet that, based on prices for restaurant food around town, was probably worth about €25 a person to us. Most days we only ate two meals.
The days are already getting confused in my mind, but I do recall that our daughters refused to give us directions to the apartment. They have the ridiculous idea that because we sometimes forget things we can't find our way around a city, most of whose streets form a rectangular grid, when we only have about 9 blocks to go, and there is only one place where we turn from one street to another. So that first day we took a taxi to the apartment, after waiting until an hour when they might be awake.
Morgan and Wax have a small apartment consisting of a living room, bedroom, kitchen, shower and laundry room, bathroom, and, of course, a sauna.These rooms are all pretty small, and the living room seemed even smaller because Lillian was sleeping on a portable bed occupying most of the middle. The corner grocery, a half a block away, is very convenient. It seems to be what you would get if you took a full sized supermarket and removed three quarters of every aisle, or maybe 4/5s.
Morgan has already blogged about the sequence of our activities while we were in Finland, and it would be pointless for me to try to do the same. Instead, I'll just talk about my impressions of various things we did and saw.
Ice cream. Probably because their summer is so short many Finns seem to feel that a summer day without ice cream is a day wasted. Moving and stationary ice cream trucks and ice cream stands are everywhere and so are people carrying ice cream cones. I think every place that sells food sells ice cream. Of course our summer is about seven months long, so we have plenty of time for eating ice cream, and it doesn't seem that special. When your typical summer lasts only a few weeks and temperatures almost never get out of the 70s, ice cream takes on all the permanence of a mayfly.
Of course, this summer was the hottest in 75 years. All those sweaters, jackets, long pants, flannel shirts, that we brought for the nights during which the temperature would dip down into the 50s, went unused. But people got to have their ice cream.
The town square contains a market for six days a week, at least in summertime. The central part is dominated by a farmer's market, which includes a fishmonger. Around the outside are all sorts of booths: ice cream, T-shirts, imported clothing from India, yard sale stuff, a traveling used bookstore. Everything is on deliberately rough fake cobblestones. They are stone all right, but they are rectangular and cut to a brick shape. Traveling in a manual wheelchair on this stuff is exhausting. We bought a small wooden platter, a t-shirt, and some peas. Finns snack on 'em. You see the hulls on the ground everywhere, even indoors, but these are English peas. They're not sweet, they are chalky. My God, somebody needs to introduce these people to sugar snap or snow peas. I think they would even grow there. I saw some used paperback English-language science fiction in the square, including some books I have been meaning to read. I didn't buy them because I had enough reading material with me. The yard sales were just like they would have been if they were in the front yard. We could've picked up some inexpensive dishes. They didn't match our dining room.
We went to the old market twice. It is similar to the market in the square, but it is inside an old brick building. There are two or three butchers, two or three bakers, some touristy stuff, a café, a toy store, and more. We bought a few things there, but not the 200 pound teddy bear. It sure was astounding. I enjoyed the Nordic Engrish. My memory doesn't bring any of it up right now, but it was ubiquitous. Explanatory signs were particularly amusing.
Curb cuts in Turku are either very good or abominable. The former are designed intentionally as smooth and gentle ramps. The latter are rectangular solids of granite, 4 inches high, that have been roughly sawed off at a 45° angle. I actually have encountered a worse curb cut on the University of Alabama campus. That one is sawn asphalt, with a 1 inch lip. Followed by a 3 inch wide gutter and a 3 inch lip up. It has "wheel trap" written all over it.
We took a taxi up the hill to the art museum. It isn't really far, but the way is too steep for anyone to push me. It may be too steep for me to go in my power wheelchair. I had to use to lift us to see the art museum. It's not very big. There was a pretty substantial exhibit of Finnish paintings (and a bit of sculpture and printing) of nature and mostly rural life covering a good bit of Finnish art history. I assume there were pieces of art made by those who lived in what is now Finland before they called themselves Finns, but none of that stuff was included in the exhibit. I enjoyed the exhibit. There were a lot of Impressionist paintings, some of which appealed to untutored me. The other exhibit in the museum consisted of huge pieces of wood possibly shaped with a chain saw and painted in black, red, and at least one other color I think. The pieces were all three-dimensional, but gave an impression of being deeper than they really were. Some of them almost looked like they were two-dimensional representations of deep three-dimensional objects. I really did not like the show. I was not impressed with any emotional content of the work, probably because of my ignorance again. I did like the play with perspective, because it was done well. Pushing me back downhill, to Morgan's favorite restaurant was without incident. Turku was spared tabloid headlines about aerial wheelchairs.
The 13th century cathedral began with a leisurely stroll across the river and up the path to the accessible door. Oh wait, that was just me. For some of the other people there was a grueling climb shoving me up a steep gravel driveway that was clearly intended for vehicles moving under their own power. Again, no tabloid headlines were enabled, and I thought the interior of the cathedral was well worth the effort. The sarcophagi of knights, the knights themselves reproduced in carved stone on the lids, the painted ceilings, the reliquary that was easily large enough to hold an entire saint, but which was reportedly empty, the blaring organ music, combined with architectural details too numerous to mention or even recall, made the cathedral one of the high points of the tourist part of our visit
A very nice-looking antique store was right across the street from our hotel. We didn't really want to buy anything there, but we both wanted to explore it. Somehow we never made it, partly because Sheila was pretty sure I would not fit in the aisles. Just remember, when it comes to my wheelchair, I force it to fit. Ask the employees of Books A Million. They didn't believe me. WHY didn't they believe me!? Then again, maybe that was one of the reasons too.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
wheelchair accessible hotel review
Hotel review
Holiday Inn, downtown Turku, Finland
EERIKINKATU 28, TURKU FI 20100
Phone: 358-2-338211, Fax: 358-2-3382299
July 17-July 29, 2010
David C. Kopaska-Merkel
jopnquog gmail.com
Let me just say that this is the best wheelchair accessible hotel room I have stayed in (with the possible exception of the only other Finnish Hotel where I have stayed). Also, an unlimited breakfast buffet made the price (a little more than €100 per night) extraordinarily reasonable. When we go back to Turku, we will stay there again.
In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I like small children and was traveling in a manual wheelchair with which I need considerable pushing help.
The Finns don't understand the relationship between wheelchairs and thresholds. Had I been rolling in my power chair I would have been able to get in over the bumpy spots. They were a problem. The lobby was as large as it needed to be and the desk clerks all spoke English. This was lucky for me, because I don't speak Finnish or Swedish, the two languages of Turku (besides English: most people in their 40s or younger speak at least a little English). There were only two elevators, but it is a fairly small hotel, and we usually did not have to wait long.
The room was small, but it was large enough. We had rented a portable lift, and there was room to maneuver it so that I could get in and out of bed and in and out of my manual chair and shower chair with no problem. I could not really reach the desk, but we could have moved it so that I could reach it. I could see out the window, but there wasn't much of a view. If the neighbors across the way had been exhibitionists, the view might have been a little interesting!
The bathroom has a low threshold, but I was able to get over it by myself, and I am not very strong. The shower area is small, and I kept bumping off the water with my elbow as I used the hand-held shower. It would have been nice to be able to get away from the controls without being out of the shower curtain.
The breakfast buffet was awesome. I had not even realized we got one, but I think it's the main reason other guests choose the son of having it in in quite a few restaurants in tour crew on this trip, I estimate that the breakfast was worth at least €20 per person. (If you eat a big breakfast, which we did.) We ate so much breakfast that most days we were able to skip lunch, and we like to eat lunch. We're talking smoked fish, scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, pancakes, three kinds of bread, salad, watermelon, diced melons and other fruit, bananas pears and oranges, coffee and all of the usual variety of breakfast drinks, Archipelago bread, which is almost like a dessert bread, yogurt, dry cereal, and I'm sure there was more.
Right across the street from the front door of the hotel is the bus stop for Moominworld. This is like Disney World. And this explains why the free breakfast buffet is full of families with two or three children below the age of seven. I'm sure lunch is expensive and not nutritious at Moominworld. If you eat enough free breakfast at the hotel, you don't have to buy lunch at all. By and large, the kids are well behaved, and we had no problem with them.
To summarize, what I like least about the hotel are the danged thresholds. What I like most about it is the wonderful breakfast. I have to say that the location, just a few blocks from the Turku town square, isn't too shabby either.
-30-
Holiday Inn, downtown Turku, Finland
EERIKINKATU 28, TURKU FI 20100
Phone: 358-2-338211, Fax: 358-2-3382299
July 17-July 29, 2010
David C. Kopaska-Merkel
jopnquog
Let me just say that this is the best wheelchair accessible hotel room I have stayed in (with the possible exception of the only other Finnish Hotel where I have stayed). Also, an unlimited breakfast buffet made the price (a little more than €100 per night) extraordinarily reasonable. When we go back to Turku, we will stay there again.
In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I like small children and was traveling in a manual wheelchair with which I need considerable pushing help.
The Finns don't understand the relationship between wheelchairs and thresholds. Had I been rolling in my power chair I would have been able to get in over the bumpy spots. They were a problem. The lobby was as large as it needed to be and the desk clerks all spoke English. This was lucky for me, because I don't speak Finnish or Swedish, the two languages of Turku (besides English: most people in their 40s or younger speak at least a little English). There were only two elevators, but it is a fairly small hotel, and we usually did not have to wait long.
The room was small, but it was large enough. We had rented a portable lift, and there was room to maneuver it so that I could get in and out of bed and in and out of my manual chair and shower chair with no problem. I could not really reach the desk, but we could have moved it so that I could reach it. I could see out the window, but there wasn't much of a view. If the neighbors across the way had been exhibitionists, the view might have been a little interesting!
The bathroom has a low threshold, but I was able to get over it by myself, and I am not very strong. The shower area is small, and I kept bumping off the water with my elbow as I used the hand-held shower. It would have been nice to be able to get away from the controls without being out of the shower curtain.
The breakfast buffet was awesome. I had not even realized we got one, but I think it's the main reason other guests choose the son of having it in in quite a few restaurants in tour crew on this trip, I estimate that the breakfast was worth at least €20 per person. (If you eat a big breakfast, which we did.) We ate so much breakfast that most days we were able to skip lunch, and we like to eat lunch. We're talking smoked fish, scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, pancakes, three kinds of bread, salad, watermelon, diced melons and other fruit, bananas pears and oranges, coffee and all of the usual variety of breakfast drinks, Archipelago bread, which is almost like a dessert bread, yogurt, dry cereal, and I'm sure there was more.
Right across the street from the front door of the hotel is the bus stop for Moominworld. This is like Disney World. And this explains why the free breakfast buffet is full of families with two or three children below the age of seven. I'm sure lunch is expensive and not nutritious at Moominworld. If you eat enough free breakfast at the hotel, you don't have to buy lunch at all. By and large, the kids are well behaved, and we had no problem with them.
To summarize, what I like least about the hotel are the danged thresholds. What I like most about it is the wonderful breakfast. I have to say that the location, just a few blocks from the Turku town square, isn't too shabby either.
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