Claire has arrived for a visit and luckily the annual Helsinki Festival is still going on. She missed the French company Les Plasticiens Volants and their balloon procession through Helsinki but Gerald and I saw it. Here are some pictures and I suggest you look them up the web too, to see moving images - really spectacular in person though. We also saw a Russian clown troop last night, Teatr Licedei, performing "Semianyki", a hilarious mostly pantomime show of family life - they too have some online footage - and as Claire studied 'clown' this last year, she was very happy to catch this comedia performance. We'll also see the Belarus Free Theatre Sunday, so she'll get quite a dose of far away art this visit. Gerald and I saw Kraftwerk (German) and Buika (Spanish/flamenco) and so we've been getting around this festival all while staying in town, and all of it has been really inspired. Even the canoe exhibition in my neighborhood! Art everywhere to bring summer to a close.

Festival of the Arts

Floating giant balloons! As I was happily watching the cute fish floating through the plaza, Gerald pointed behind me and there was a huge fanged sea snake emerging from a side street, then it chased the fish a bit and descended down into the thrilled crowd too. The kids were fearless. What a wonderful performance - the puppeteers just walked right in the crowd and the jellyfish in particular was beautiful with its tentacles opening and closing as it ebbed up and down. We couldn't see the others - a whale, a lobster, some seahorses, because there were so many people - more than the Madonna gig even! I'm so glad we got to see more of the festival this year as we won't be here for it next year.

Porvoo

We had a busy July with a welcome visit from my brother Chris and his wife Jo. We did a bit of travel around the region - to Stockholm, Tallinn, and then to this small historic wooden Finnish village east of Helsinki. As I've posted Stockholm and Tallinn pictures before, here are some of Porvoo. It has an old fishing dock and a medieval cathedral that dates from the 13th century. We took a 3-hour boat ride on a nicely restored wooden ferry through the scenic archipelago to get there, then a one-hour bus ride back - a very pleasant day trip.

We can hear her singing as I type. We walked down to check it all out and I took some pictures to share with you - as it happens! I am not a Madonna fan, although we are both from Michigan and near in age, but watching them mount this superstar enterprise has been interesting. I must admit I much preferred our evening listening to the 57 year old Chrissie Hynde & the Pretenders a few months ago - that is one rockin' chick! So - no pictures of the front of the stage as it's pointed to the sea, but here's our view of the scene in the neighborhood (continuing on page 2), including a young fan who couldn't get a ticket - isn't she cute? And they are still running the ferries to Tallinn beside the venue - we were on that same green and orange ship with Chris & Jo just over a week ago.

Hyvää Madonna Päivää!

There's a big party in our neighborhood tonight - 100,000 extra people are here to see Madonna performing her first concert in Finland, and tickets sold out within a few hours. 85,000 are inside the new concert venue they've just built about at the end of our block, and another 15,000 are cruising the perimeter. Here is the port area before the stage was built and then after - it's about 3 stories tall so it's set back a ways. They've recently cleared out a huge shipping and container operation from this port, ahead of building a new residential area soon. It's a whole new world tonight.