The tram clatters over the points at Hakaniemi and the whole carriage tilts gently, like a ship finding its sea legs. It's Sunday, and the city has that particular Sunday feeling — the streets a little emptier, the cafes doing their quiet trade, the bells of Kallio Church marking time over the rooftops. I'm on the number 8, heading north through districts I've only seen on maps until today. There is something about a Sunday tram ride that teaches you a city better than any guided tour, because you see it at rest, without its working face on.
I paid for this ride with my HSL travel card, which I finally got properly sorted yesterday. The single fare would have been something like three euros ten, but the monthly pass for the AB zone runs around seventy to seventy-five euros, depending on where you get it. That feels like the kind of thing worth knowing before you arrive, because it changes how you move. Once you have the pass, you stop thinking about tickets and just ride. You hop on and off without calculation. The trams become furniture, part of the city's bones.
My plan, such as it is, is to ride to the end of the line and back again, then walk. I'm told the summer has brought disruptions to the commuter trains — A trains suspended, some stations closed for a while, replacement buses running — but the trams, so far, seem to be on their own rhythm. The 8 takes me through Kallio first, past the Karhupuisto, the Bear Park, where people are already sitting on benches with coffee cups and newspapers that they're not actually reading. There's a whole culture here of sitting in parks and pretending to read while actually just watching the light move.
Kallio has a reputation. It was a working-class district once, and it still has that honesty, even now that the vintage shops and the craft beer bars have moved in. The streets are a little scruffier, a little more alive. I get off the tram at the top of the hill and walk past Ravintola Kannas, which has its windows open to the street. I'm told it's a neighbourhood institution, the kind of place where you can get a proper lunch for around fifteen euros, maybe less if you stick to the daily special. I don't go in yet. I'm saving it.
Instead, I walk up to the Kallio Church itself, which sits on its hill like a grey granite ship. It's a funny thing, this church — designed by Lars Sonck, finished in 1912, all dark stone and severe lines. It doesn't try to be pretty. It just is. The doors are open, so I step inside for a moment, and the cool hits me like a glass of water on a warm day. Sunday service is over, but the space still holds the hush of it. I sit in a pew for a few minutes, not praying, just being quiet in the way a church allows you to be. In a city that sometimes feels very busy on the inside even when the streets are calm, that quiet is a kind of luxury.
The bells start up as I leave, a proper old-fashioned clangour that bounces off the surrounding buildings. The sound feels very Finnish to me — unhurried, solid, a bit stubborn. I stand on the church steps and look down over the rooftops towards the harbour. From up here you can see how the city is put together. The neoclassical centre around Senate Square, where I spent my first morning; the newer towers further out; the green belt of the Central Park, Keskuspuisto, cutting in from the north. It's a city built on granite, which means it has a kind of permanence. It isn't going anywhere, and neither, somehow, am I.
Sunday lunch, then. I walk back down the hill towards the Hakaniemi Market Hall, which has been standing since 1914. The hall is a brick cathedral of food — herring, rye bread, fresh vegetables, cheeses, little stalls selling the first bilberries of the season. The bilberries are small and almost inky blue, sweeter and more complex than the cultivated ones. I buy a small punnet for a few euros and eat them standing outside, watching the market square where a few stalls are doing a quiet trade in flowers and second-hand books. The season for crayfish, the rapu, has just opened, I'm told, and a couple of restaurants are already advertising their rapu-juhlat, their crayfish parties, as an evening affair. That feels like a thing to come back for.
Inside the market hall, I stop at a small counter with a seat at the window and order salmon soup. It arrives steaming, creamy, with chunks of salmon and dill, and a side of dark rye bread. The whole thing costs about fourteen euros, which is on the high end of the weekday lunch, but this is the weekend and it feels like a proper meal. The soup is the colour of the sea in winter, pale and milky, but the taste is all summer. I eat slowly, watching people come and go. A father with a small child on his shoulders. Two elderly women deep in conversation. A man in a work uniform buying a bag of coffee beans. The city at Sunday pace.
After lunch, I decide to walk south through the Design District, starting in Punavuori. The streets there — Iso Roobertinkatu, Uudenmaankatu — are lined with small galleries and studios, closed today mostly, but the windows are still worth looking into. I stop at Kaffa Roastery for a cappuccino, which costs me about four euros seventy, which feels about right for Helsinki. The coffee is good, properly roasted, and the barista asks me in English where I'm from, a question I'm slowly learning to answer. I say I'm settling in, which is true, and she smiles and says the Finnish word for welcome, or something close to it. Moi, she says, when I leave. Moi.
This is the thing about Helsinki in August. It's the tail end of summer, and the city knows it. The evenings are drawing in, noticeably, even though the light still holds until nearly ten. There's a particular quality to this time of year — a kind of golden melancholy, a sense that something good is ending. The Finns have a word for that too, sisu, but that's not it exactly. Sisu is more about perseverance, about pushing through. This is something softer. It's the feeling of a summer's evening when you know the night will come, but you're not afraid of it.
I walk back north through Eira and Ullanlinna, the quiet residential streets with their wooden villas and their gardens full of late roses. This part of the city is almost embarrassingly pretty, and I'm told the rents here reflect it — a modest one-bedroom flat in the centre will set you back something like a thousand to thirteen hundred euros a month. Eira is more. I pass the Uunisaari ferry landing, where a few people are waiting with towels and picnic bags, and I make a mental note to come back. The sauna island. The one that is actually an island. This summer is for learning the basics, but there's room for more.
By late afternoon I find myself at the edge of the Töölö district, near the Rock Church. Temppeliaukio, they call it, because it's blasted down into the bedrock and covered with a copper dome. I'm told the acoustics are remarkable, and that it's a famous venue for concert recordings. It costs about twenty euros to get in, which feels steep for a church, but it also functions as a kind of museum, and the space is genuinely like nothing I've seen. The rock walls are rough and raw, and the light comes in through a ring of windows set between the rock and the copper. I stand in the middle of the space and listen. A few tourists are whispering, and the sound seems to hang suspended, as if the stone itself is holding it. I stay a long time.
The evening is closing in when I finally take the tram back towards my part of the city. The 8 again, running south now, through the same streets I rode earlier but changed by the falling light. The city is in that long golden hour that August gives you, when everything is gilded for a few minutes before the grey-blue dusk settles in. I get off near the harbour and walk along the edge of the water, where a few boats are still out, their sails just visible in the fading light. There's a festival coming, I'm told. Flow Festival, in the Suvilahti power-plant area, with a lot of big names. At the same time, there's the Hellsinki Metal Festival up at the Ice Hall. The city turns from quiet Sunday to something much louder over the next two weeks.
But tonight, it's still Sunday. I find a bench near the water and sit for a while, listening to the gulls and the lap of the harbour. The ferry to Suomenlinna is making its last runs of the day, a small boat moving steadily across the darkening water, and I watch it go. I think about the week ahead — the museums, the islands, the slow accumulation of places that will become mine. This is the work of settling in, and it happens mostly in these small moments. A tram ride. A bowl of soup. A church that is a cave in the rock. The city is starting to know me a little, and I am starting to know it. And somewhere out there, in the lakes of the east, the light is already beginning to turn towards ruska, the autumn colour, which I know will be my next lesson in what this country means.
The night is cool, around seventeen degrees, and the wind has picked up a little, but it feels not like a warning but like a promise. I stand up, brush the dust from my trousers, and walk the last few blocks home. Tomorrow, I'll go further. But tonight, the city hums its low Sunday hum, and I'm part of it. Or close enough to touch. And that, I'm learning, is what the first week is about. Not arriving. Settling. This is Helsinki, and I'm here.
That's the episode for this Sunday. I'll be back with more from Helsinki and, in time, from the lakeland to the east, as the season turns. Until then, keep moving gently. The city will wait for you.