Tom Luxsox Coins

Quincy Adams

On Tuesday we were on a bus tour outside of St. Petersburg to the town of Pushkin to see Catherine's Palace. Pushkin was the father of Russian literature, and the much revered poet who wrote the source materials that were used as the librettos for some famous operas. Pushkin, the quintessential romantic, was killed in a duel at 37.

In Pushkin we saw the very long blue and gold-encrusted facade of Catherine's Palace. Again the grounds of the palace were spectacular as were the extravagantly ornate state and family rooms. Peterhof was thought of as more of a man's place where Peter engaged in politics while his second wife, the commoner Catherine, indulged her fancies in this elaborate palace. Later Catherine the Great, Catherine II who ruled from 1762 until 1796, lived in a separate part of the palace.

Again we donned booties to buff the floors as we were shown the various ornate rooms of the building. The Amber Room is one of the most famous treasures found there. Some of the rooms have very large tall Delft china stoves.

In both palaces that we visited historically cooking was done in separate buildings on the properties because of the fear of fires. Elaborate procedures had been formulated for warming the foods near the dining salons inside the palace.

We had lunch in a restaurant on the palace grounds, again an indifferent chicken concoction. I hope the czars dined better than I did.

In the afternoon, back in St. Petersburg, we stopped across from St. Isaac's Cathedral, the city's largest church. Nearby was the apartment where John Quincy Adams, the first American ambassador to Russia lived.

Next we went to the Hermitage Museum on the Neva River. It consists of five buildings, four in a row: the Hermitage Theatre, the Old Hermitage, the Small Hermitage, and the Winter Palace, and a fifth building the New Hermitage situated behind the Old Hermitage. The buildings themselves are treasures, but inside are some of the greatest works of art in the world.

We went at 2:00 p.m. when all the other group tours were being shown through so it turned out to be noisy, very tiring, very crowded, and a hectic visit. The crowds overwhelmed the art.

The city and environs have some of the most beautiful pastel colored buildings with facades that go on for days. We were in St. Petersburg on September 8, the day the siege was lifted by the Germans on what was then Leningrad. Late that afternoon, after an exhausting visit to the Hermitage, we sailed from St. Petersburg.

The next morning as we were docking in Helsinki, a green Tallinn shuttle ferry was leaving at 7:35 for a run to the Estonian city perhaps loaded with passengers seeking cigarettes, beer and vodka. It took off at a good speed. The temperature was 70 degrees, a pleasant warm day for touring the Finnish capital.

On our city tour we were shown an Olympic stadium for the 1952 games. It seems in every city you go, they show you an Olympic site, and it seems to be a point of great national pride. Here the great Olympic hero was Paava Nurmi, "the Flying Finn." It also seems as if every city including this one has had in its history a major fire that razed some historic old downtown district.

The cities in the Baltic states we visited all had trams; they make much better use of trolley systems than we do in the States. We let ours vanish in favor of fume-spouting buses. Again in Helsinki we were in a clean, modern city where the people seemed well-dressed and prosperous. Other parts of the world seem to have crumbling infrastructures, slums, all sorts of urban blight, but except for occasional graffiti the Baltic states seem to be models of efficiency and order.

Sibelius (1865-1957) was the great Finnish composer, much revered just as Grieg is in Norway. His most famous work is "Finlandia." We visited his memorial park where 527 hollow steel tubes are clustered together. They look like organ pipes but symbolize a forest of birch trees appropriate because Sibelius loved the woodlands.

Another tourist attraction we were escorted to is the Rock Church completed in 1969. It's an underground church of granite which was blasted out from inside a giant rock formation. This Lutheran church has a copper dome, with natural lighting coming from vertical window panes. It has superb acoustics as we learned listening to a pianist playing Sibelius while we were inside. The natural stone on one section of wall resembles a waterfall.

Helsinki is a city of 580,000. To the north are the Laplanders and the reindeer, and our guide told us Finns like smoked meats and fish especially reindeer, elk, and perch. The two official languages are Swedish and Finnish, a language with Estonian and Hungarian elements.

The state religions are Lutheran and Greek orthodox. Eighty-five per cent of the people belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and many of the rest are members of The Greek Orthodox Church, part of the Constantinople branch.

During the Cold War, since Helsinki resembled a Russian city, movies like Gorky Park were filmed there.

After our bus tour we elected to stay in Helsinki on our own for a while wandering around the main shopping street. We browsed in the Samos Department Store, then looked in the expensive and big Stockholm Department Store where we ended up having a nice lunch in the spotless cafeteria on the top floor. Outside the National Theater we caught a shuttle bus back to the ship.

The Finnish archipelago is a beautiful spot to visit. Our memories of Helsinki included the sights of: three ice breakers in the harbor, an attractive waterfront, beautiful woodlands, and a very austere Lutheran cathedral. As time goes on, unfortunately, some cruise stops become blurred, and I'm afraid that's what might happen to my recollections of the Finnish capital.

John (Jack) Rooney's latest novel is "Last Passage to Santiago," a suspenseful travel-thriller that has romance, infidelity, and a kidnapping. His first book was the thriller "Nine Lives Too Many" featuring his series detective Denny Delaney pitted against the arch-terrorist Felix the Cat. That was followed by a chill-packed sequel "Clawed Back from the Dead." Rooney's book about India, "The Daemon in Our Dreams" was a blend of the naturalistic and the paranormal. In "The Rice Queen Spy" he presented the life story of a British secret operative who was "outed" and later went on to live an openly gay life while thumbing his nose at the bureaucracy that had betrayed him. The author's work schedule includes a new Delaney effort.

He was born and educated in Springfield, Massachusetts (Classical High and American International College), went on to receive a master's degree in English from Columbia University, and finished course work for his Ph.D. at N.Y.U. He has written book reviews, and feature and travel articles for newspapers and magazines. He served in the U.S. Army as a military policeman in Times Square and Vienna, Austria, and in cities in U.S. Army AWOL apprehension.

His website is http://www.senneffhouse.com.

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