A year ago I spent less than 24 hours in Helsinki on my way back from St. Petersburg. Maybe the short duration of the visit explains it — always leave ‘em wanting more — but ever since then I’ve felt something pulling me back. I don’t understand it.

I flew into and out of Helsinki on that trip even though I was really trying to get to St. Petersburg to visit a friend. I got very lucky when I arrived in the country by immediately catching a bus from the airport to the train station and then catching a train that left two hours earlier than the one I had planned on taking. That didn’t leave me enough time, though, to explore Helsinki, and if it had been my only experience of the city I would have left unimpressed, having seen the Finnish version of suburban sprawl on the bus from the airport to the city center and the smallish, dingy train station, less impressive than that of a provincial Ukrainian city like Kharkov.

On the return from St. Petersburg, though, I had a few extra days to kick around the Baltic. I spent two days — quite enough, thank you — wading through the crowds of German and British and other European tourists in the quaint Old Town, managing to get off the beaten track when I met a gay couple (one Estonian, one Russian) who took me on a nighttime tour of Tallinn’s handful of gay and gay-friendly establishments.

Ferries run across the Gulf of Finland between Helsinki and Tallinn, mostly carrying Finns across to buy alcohol that isn’t taxed at nanny-state rates. (Stores near the ferry terminal in Tallinn stock five-liter Mylar-lined boxes, like wine-in-a-box, but full of vodka.) When my ferry docked in Helsinki at about 3 in the afternoon clouds had moved in; a cold rain started as I walked to my hostel, reminding me that Finland is pretty far north and autumn would soon be arriving.

Normally I’d have taken cold, heavy rain as a sign to stay indoors with a book and a cup of tea, but I had only about 22 hours until my plane left and my trip ended. I intended to act on what seemed like the excellent advice I’d been given by someone I met at a party in Washington before I’d left. Helsinki, he said, was a city for flaneurs. Rain or no, I had some flanning to do.

Central Helsinki is a beautifully compact walking city. I made my way down Erottanjankatu to the Esplanade that leads downhill to the inner harbor and fish market (which, disappointingly, was closing for the day by the time I got there). Astonishingly, the Presidential Palace, a blue, imperial-Russian affair, faces the fish market directly and was guarded, as far as I could tell, by just a couple of guards who looked not at all worried about assassination or terrorism.

Havis Amanda, the mermaid symbol of Helsinki. Beyond her, the fish market and harbor; on the left, the baby-blue Presidential Palace.

This sense of placid well-being and safety was palpable for the rest of my visit. A large part of it came, I think, from the architecture of the city. Beautiful but not showy, restrained yet comfortable, the countless apartment buildings from the late 19th century had a quiet elegance that is missing from most Western cities I’ve been to. And the contemporary stuff maintained a certain humanism — maybe the humanism of scale, since nothing in this city of about a million is really too big. In all, an architecture of bourgeois reassurance.

The lovely Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum.

The rain forced me indoors a few times, into a cafe on the Esplanade for some overpriced but delicious cake, into a department store where I watched an unintentionally hilarious fashion show (über-serious amateur models engaging in choreographed prancing just this side of Busby Berkeley).

As night fell, I kept wandering the streets. Teenagers emerged dressed in the outfits of their chosen tribe — ravers or metalheads or whatever. They carried six-packs of beer (maybe from Tallinn), “pre-partying” to avoid the high prices of bars. (Stopping in at a few bars later, I discovered that, contrary to everything I’d been told, the drinks were no more expensive than in Manhattan.) I walked past a popular music venue with a long line of fashionable goth kids stretching out the door. (For fabulous pictures of Helsinki street fashion, check out Hel Looks — link via Brian Shollis.)

The next morning I had a nice breakfast at a popular cafe on a quiet, tree-lined street. The other patrons interacted with an energetic lack of angst. That’s part of what I liked about Helsinki: a city with an urban pace and style but (in my limited experience of it) without the anxiety of New York or Washington. Maybe it’s not such a happy place in the winter; maybe the whole scene was just a result of massive, government-mandated doses of Zoloft.

After 22 hours in Hesinki, I felt I’d learned just a little about it. There’s complicated stuff there, I’m sure — the weird relationships with the Russians and the Swedes, to name a couple of things that have left a mark on the city. And why are there so many cool Finnish composers? Helsinki remains suble and mysterious. I’ll have to go back.