NYLON - March 2008 - (Page 164) FINNLY DISGUISED As Scandinavia’s larger cities continue to try and one-up each other, Helsinki is emerging as the unlikely leader of the pack. By Nick Duerden. Photographed by Gilbert McCarragher It is an overcast day in Helsinki in late November, the clouds so low it seems as though you could reach out and touch them, the temperature hovering just below freezing. It was raining yesterday, and will rain again soon. Daylight feebly managed to assert itself at around 10 o’clock this morning, and by three it’ll be dark once more. People are huddled deep into their North Face coats, glum and grim but determined to see it out. “You have come here to Helsinki in November?” asks Taru Norberg, a pretty blonde assistant at Secco, a design shop in the city’s fashion district. “Why? Get on a plane and go to Lapland instead [in the far north of the country and the home of Santa Claus], or else come back after Christmas when it is snowing and all is white and beautiful. Nobody comes to Helsinki in November.” A few hours later, a woman in a bar concurs. “I think you may have chosen the very worst time to come,” she says. “Go home.” While this would not necessarily be an opinion shared by Finland’s tourist board, the general Location: Southern Finland Population: 565,000 Official language: Finnish Currency: Euro (approximately 0.67 to the US dollar)
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