It’s Day 5 of Gate 1’s “9-Day Taste of Finland and Estonia” tour and we took the option of traveling west of Helsinki to historic Turku, Finland’s oldest city and former capital. Each day we are assigned new seats on the bus, and today I sat next to Lily, a Taiwanese woman from Torrance, California who was a former children’s choir director at her church. It took us nearly two hours to travel the 104 miles to Turku.

The focus of our trip to Turku was a visit to the medieval fortress built in 1280. As one of the country’s oldest and largest surviving stone buildings, it has served as a military defense stronghold, a Renaissance royal court under Duke John, and a prison. It was famously used to imprison the deposed Swedish King Erik XIV (Duke John’s brother).

I found it an interesting maze of dark corridors, narrow stairwells, and curving steps. I made sure to hang onto the railings when navigating the many steps!

It was brought to our attention the importance of Saint Bridget (also known as Birgitta Birgersdotter) born in 1304, who is venerated in the Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches for her visions of a church by “sparkling waters.” She married at age 13 and had eight children. She is the patron saint of the European Union, among others.

According to Wikipedia, Saint Bridget prayed for a long time to know how many blows Jesus Christ suffered during the Passion. Jesus was said to have responded to these prayers by appearing to her and stating that “I received 5480 blows upon My Body. If you wish to honor them in some way, recite fifteen Our Fathers and fifteen Hail Marys with the following Prayers, which I Myself shall teach you, for an entire year. When the year is finished, you will have honored each of My Wounds.

For lunch, our tour manager, Inger, recommended a hearty salmon soup, which we found to be delicious! It is obvious that salmon is a popular dish here, as evidenced by the presence of salmon in many of the food stalls of the marketplace we visited.

We then visited a Greek orthodox church near an outdoor marketplace. We drove then to the coastal town of Naantali where we saw Saint Bridget’s Church, then climbed up to a scenic lookout for a view of the boats.

This was an all-day excursion—we left the hotel at 8:30 in the morning and did not return until after 7:00 pm. We’ll be leaving Helsinki tomorrow morning and will be taking a ferry to Tallin, Estonia.