We ran across this accordion player sitting on a bridge that links Helsinki’s harborside market to its main Street, the Esplanade.

The only thing I know about accordions is that my sister used to play one. This guy didn’t speak a word of English, but he played a mean Lady of Spain and was quite willing to pose with Jamie.

We’re in Helsinki for less than 48 hours, so this is really more of a layover on our way to St Petersburg, Russia.

There’s a daily market held in an open area adjacent to the port where the cruise ships dock. Dozens of food vendors sell their wares. We had incredible fresh salmon lunches both days.

Swedish and Norwegian may be foreign languages, but lots of written words were recognizable and it was even possible to figure out what some sentences in those languages meant. Finnish is something altogether different. We’ve never seen longer words. It almost looks Hawaiian. “Hey, meet me at the corner of Kanavarantna and Kanalkajan.” And those are a couple of the shorter words. I feel sorry for advertising copywriters who need to come up with short headlines.

Jamie’s a sucker for things like “The Bridge of Love”. Couples write their names on padlocks, attach them to the side of the bridge, and throw the keys in the water. It represents eternal love.

Love the sentiment expressed in the sign.

Yes, they’re out of chronological order, but here are a couple more photos from back in Stockholm.

It’s easy to get lost in the narrow, twisting, turning alleys of Stockholm’s Old Town.

This is the Ice Bar in Stockholm. It’s a huge igloo made out of blocks of ice and sits inside the lobby of a local hotel. The walls are made of ice, the bar is made of ice, the glasses are made of ice, the tables are made of ice, the chairs are made ice. It’s kept at a constant -5 degrees.

C’mon, admit it. You’ve always wanted to wear one of these Viking helmets with the horns. Jamie looks fearsome, doesn’t she?

Let’s be kind and simply say that our cruise ship doesn’t qualify for the Holland America fleet. And hasn’t for about 15 years. Seeing it in the distance like this would have been the best way to see it.

Yeah, I made the reservation, so I have to take the fall for this one. But in my defense, Jamie and I both failed to do our homework on Helsinki. Instead of thinking of it as an actual destination that downtrodden residents of the former Communist bloc might want to visit, we just thought of it as a stopover on the way to St. Petersburg, Russia.

For some reason, I thought our ship was going to be a ferry with kind of basic accommodations. I had fantasies of plying the seas on a tramp steamer. It never occurred to me that there were cruise ships (of a sort) sailing between Stockholm and Helsinki. It never occurred to me that if there were, ours would be kind of old and tacky and have an odd but indistinguishable smell.

Our cabin was about the size of Nelson Mandela’s jail cell, but not as nice. Jamie called our ocean liner “the Motel 6 of cruise ships”. While she was on a roll, she added, “And that was the worst $90 dinner I’ve ever had.”

Here’s all you need to know: Our bad dinner cost $90, but the 18-hour cruise itself cost just $60.

We made new friends on the cruise between Stockholm, Sweden and Helsinki, Finland. And almost lost them.

This is Teppo, our new Finnish friend. We rode down the elevator with him, his wife Kristina, his friend Ismo and Ismo’s wife Kulika. A bit later Jamie and I were out on the sundeck trying to take a selfie when Teppo came out and volunteered to take a photo of us.

Jamie handed him her camera, Teppo took it, immediately handed it to me, squeezed between us, and said, “Here. Take a picture of us.”

Some time later Jamie and I were sitting on the observation deck as the ship sailed down the beautiful fjord that leads from Stockholm to the Baltic Sea. Teppo and his entourage came into the room and he brought them over to make introductions.

Teppo, easy to pronounce. Same with Kristina. Ditto on Ismo. But Kulika is a tongue twister in Finnish. When I tried to pronounce it, they all looked kind of embarrassed and told me I was pronouncing it incorrectly. I tried again, but they looked even more uncomfortable. They tried to coach me, but the more I tried to say it the more uncomfortable they got.

Finally, Kristina said, “The way you pronounce it is a very bad word in Finnish.” They all nodded in agreement.

“Really?” I said. “What does it mean the way I pronounced it?”

They all hesitated to answer. Teppo finally solved the impasse by patting his penis.

So rest assured, I am doing my part for international relations by calling one of our new Finnish friends a prick.

I’m talking about the decrepit old wreck on the right, although you’re forgiven if you thought I meant the one on the left.

The Vasa was the largest warship Sweden had ever launched when it left the shipyard in 1628. About 30 minutes later it hit rough seas, started rolling back and forth, taking on more water with each swing of the pendulem, and sank like a rock within 30 minutes.

The ship was preserved in the cold, brackish water of the Baltic Sea, rediscovered in the 1950s, and refloated in the early ’60s. They built a really interesting museum to house the largely-intact Vasa and did a little restoration work, but mostly left it was it was. The Vasa is so large that the museum that was built to house it is five stories tall. You can go from floor to floor and view the various levels of the ship right at eye level.

I love history museums, but Jamie generally exhibits far less enthusiasm than I do. But even she thought the Vasa Museum was really interesting.

Gabriel is the waiter/owner at Jerntorgith, the sidewalk cafe in Stockholm’s old quarter, where we had the incredible Swedish meatballs. I liked the meatballs. He liked Jamie. Fair trade.

Stockholm is beautiful. Really beautiful. It’s a lot bigger and busier than Oslo, and it’s obvious that one was the center of an empire and the other wasn’t. We still prefer the size and pace of Oslo, but there’s no dispute that Stockholm is stunning.

Today we roamed through the narrow alleyways of the old quarter, took a sightseeing cruise around the Baltic Sea, the lake and the canals around which the city is built, went to the Vasa Museum (thanks again to Brad Parkinson for the recommendation), and also went to the very strange Helmut Newton and Motohiko Odani photo exhibits at the Fotografiska Museum.

But the highlight of the day may have been the Swedish meatball lunch we had in the old quarter. It was unbelievable. While we were enjoying it I asked Jamie if she thought this might be one of those times when you’re just so hungry that whatever’s put in front of you seems like the best thing you’ve ever eaten. She said, “No. This is really, really good.”

They bore no resemblance to the Swedish meatballs my French mother used to make.

We arrived in Stockholm and found our way to our hotel around 2:00 yesterday afternoon. We hadn’t eaten since an early breakfast that morning, so we quickly found a little sidewalk cafe about two blocks from the hotel. Jamie took one look at the truly stunning Swedish women eating lunch at this ordinary cafe, looked at me and said, “Holy crap. I’m becoming a lesbian.” Couldn’t say I blamed her.

Today we were walking down to the harbor and she spotted a Swedish man with a great head of hair (I hate the son of a bitch) and just enough stubble on his face to make him seem like a bad boy. He was also wearing one of the very tight suits that seem to be in fashion here.

I looked at her. I waited. And waited. And waited.

She finally looked away from him, turned to me and said, “I changed my mind.”

NOTE: The photo above is obviously not taken at the restaurant. We were taking a boat tour of Stockholm yesterday and these girls in bikinis all waved as we went by. I’m pretty sure they were waving at me.

A statue of a tiger out in front of our hotel. I couldn’t resist. I probably should have, but couldn’t.

Just after I took this photo, officials rushed out of the Edvard Munch Museum to give Jamie an award for being the 10,000,000th visitor to have her photo taken in this pose.