I saw the punchline coming, though they didn't mean it as a joke. A filmmaker from Estonia was explaining what a young city Helsinki is, and I started chuckling while I asked "How young?"
I knew it was going to be older than our entire country. Twice as old. It was built when the old capital burned. I think they said that had been there about 1200 years.
Such a different scale here. When we drove to my grandmother's house as a child, I hated that section of Chicago--a tiny little place called Stickney, near Cicero--because it felt so repulsively old. The houses and the streets too, were maybe 75. Seemed like a different planetary age to me.
Not really. Not measured in European terms--which is itself one of the youngsters of civilization, especially these northern stretches.
On the way back to the hotel, I mentioned how some of the buildings reminded me of St. Petersburg. "Oh yes, same architect," the woman said. Only 300 years. A new section of town.
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This is the thing I always remember when I'm somewhere "old." How "not old" everything is here -- the buildings, I mean. The land, well, that's been here for aeons.
But I remember when I was living for a while in Lisieux, France, I would often eat my lunch on the church steps. The church was begun in 1170 and finished in 1340. In the over hundred years that it took to build the village church, architectural styles changed, so one tower was gothic, and the other romanesque. ( I think.)
Anyway, I used to think about how many generations of people had been on those steps, and I would be humbled.
I spent some very fun times in Helsinki back when I was in my early 20's. Very fun times, indeed!
Personally, I enjoy visiting anything historic when possible.
enjoy your time there, Dave.
It's just as well we're a young country, though, given how we venerate ourselves. In another 100 years, the entirety of Washington D.C. is going to be nothing but monuments, the White House, the Capitol, and buildings of the Smithsonian. You'll be tripping over monuments to the Gulf War, Gulf War II, the Afghan War, and (for all I know) the Cold War.