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We talk of Finland and Russian and the uneasy coexistence between these countries after World War II as we bus eastward the next morning along The Kings Road, a direct route to Stockholm and St. Petersburg. We are going to Porvoo, founded in 1346, the second oldest city in Finland after Turku, a traditional settlement for writers and artists with tiny eighteenth-and nineteenth century gingerbread houses. Much of The Kings Road stretches through dense tree growths, and we see traffic signs warning that moose occasionally cross the highway. We are told that Finland is home to an estimated 150,000 moose as well as a few bears and wolves, which have become an endangered, and protected species.

Porvoo was an old harbor town, and along the banks of its river are red-painted wood houses, which were built originally to store salt. Today, preserved, repainted, and with roofs zinc-sheathed, they are desirable weekend cottages for people from Helsinki, who often go out to Porvoo by river steamer. The town is small and pleasant to walk through. The rough exteriors of its wood buildings, painted powder blue, yellow, and cream, with dainty, decorated tin awnings over their entries, some dating back four hundred years, are protected by law, and any new construction must blend with them. Porvoo is basically a Swedish town, a reminder of what Finland was like during the period of Swedish domination from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. To this day even many Finns refer to Porvoo as Borge, its Swedish name, and relish walking to its market square through the street called Välikatu, because it is dated 1346 and the oldest existing street in the country. Most notable in Porvoo is the cathedral, built in the fifteenth century but with a base structure that proves there was some sort of a house of worship on that site as early as the thirteenth century.

Constant restoration has uncovered medieval frescoes in the stucco and stone church, which because — when the Russians made Finland a Grand Duchy — a symbol of its Protestantism, which the Russians were obliged to tolerate. We stop for morning coffee and pastries in the Wanha Laamanni, a tiny restaurant of several rooms with white stenciled walls and handmade furniture, which is just next to the cathedral. Then we depart Porvoo, doubling back a few miles toward Helsinki to the HAIKKO MANOR hotel for lunch. The Haikko, just downriver from central Porvoo and a regular river steamer stop, is one of Finland's finer resort hotels, reminiscent of an English country house. It is colonnaded, commands a view of lawns so sweeping they can contain a golf course, has twenty-seven utterly beautiful rooms all furnished with antiques, and is home to two ghosts, the friendly sort we are assured, who annoy only those guests whom they suspect may be averse to paying their hotel bills. The 1871 building also houses a quite satisfactory smorgasbord that contained, among other things, a delicious roast fresh ham stuffed with apples and prunes.

It is not a long drive back to Helsinki and our sauna at the Kalastajatorppa, and a nap, before taking a late tram into central Helsinki to hear some American jazz at a restaurant called Groovy. The music is New Orleans, the drink is koskenkorva, or the wonderful tangy beer called Karjala, and we finish the long, long day with pizza. The Finns must love pizza, a conclusion to be drawn simply by noting all of the pizzerias scattered about, one of which is the RIVOLI and supposedly Helsinki's best. We shared that night a "Quattro Stagioni," an adventurous pie covered with tomaattia, juustoa (cheese), herkkusienia (mushrooms), kinkkua (ham), paprika, sipulia (onions), parsaa (asparagus), cayennepippuria, valkosipulia (garlic), and oreganoa. It was, to be sure, a most memorable gastronomic adventure.

The next morning, we entrain westward to Turku, the capital of Finland until 1812. It is a large city, with 165,000 inhabitants, and quite similar to Helsinki because of the dominance of its architecture, which was also designed by Engel along neoclassical lines, and because, like Helsinki, it was virtually rebuilt in the nineteenth century after a series of devastating fires. The reconstructed Castle of Turku overlooks the Aura River, which divides the city. On the river's eastern side is the cathedral, an amalgam of styles that include thirteenth-century stone walls, fifteenth-century Gothic vaulting, and the clean, square lines of Engel, who redesigned the church after a fire destroyed it in 1827.

And no more than a hundred yards from that church, just down Bishop's Street, is still another different piece of architecture, the Sibelius Museum, an open-to-the-sky square of poured reinforced concrete and stone. Its official name is the Institute of Musicology at Abo Akademi, but it is known by just about everybody as the Sibelius Museum. It contains a collection of antique musical instruments, photographs, paintings, drawings, and memorabilia of Sibelius and a sound system that surrounds you completely with his music as you sit in the open center of its auditorium. Still another, newer aspect of Turku is the nearby town of Naantali, a fishing village turned summer sailing resort that also happens to be the summer residence of the president of Finland; and there always seem to be more sails billowing, more boats tacking into shore when the blue-cross-on-white flag is flying from the waterfront house, because then the Finns know that the president is at home.

Of consuming interest are Turku's two markets, a huge, open square filled with vegetable kiosks and a tiny gambling tent where the farmers play a form of roulette for fresh coffee. And there is the enclosed Kauppahalli, a true kaleidoscope of Finnish food products. A good deal of reindeer meat — noisettes, loins, chops — is for sale in this extraordinarily beautiful market, restored just two years ago. And there are the sausages, those blood sausages called verimakkara; a rice and fat sausage called uunimakkara; even reindeer sausage, which goes by the name of porolenkki and the pork sausages called lenkkimakkara, which are to be eaten only after being grilled on the stones of the sauna.

There were karjalanpiirakka, so-called Karelian pasties, half-moons filled with either seasoned rice or potatoes, a vestige of Finland's gastronomic past when Karelia was part of Finland, not Russia; kalakukko, loaves of bread with lake fish, such as perch or pike, baked inside of them; and omenapiirakka, a sugarless tart filled with apples. In markets throughout Finland an inquiry will immediately result in a taste — often quite generous — and that afternoon in Turku was certainly no exception.

From Turku we went north, far north, just below the Arctic Circle to Rovaniemi, the city that is the heart of Finnish Lapland, or Lappi as it is called. The landscape changes markedly: The forests seem unending and the towns and cities, the clearings of civilization, mere interruptions in the pattern of trees and lakes and rivers. The Laplanders will tell you that in the many hundreds of square miles of the north there are only 200,000 people, one for each of the 200,000 reindeer. Actually, what is known as Lapland is a long stretch of country that encompasses parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia, and the Lapps, descendants of northern aborigines, have become minority inhabitants of all of these countries. In Finland it is estimated that only four thousand of the people in the province of Lappi are true Lapps. Where the south is flat, northern Finland is rolling, often steeply hilly. It is a land for loggers and, for the Lapps, reindeer herding.

One can drive to Rovaniemi via the Arctic Highway (Route 4) from Helsinki, but we flew, and with one stop en route it was just an hour by air. Rovaniemi is basically a new town reconstructed upon ashes left in 1944 by the retreating German armies, home to thirty thousand people. Historically it was a lumber and trading center for both the Swedes and the Russians. Reindeer pelts are piled high in front of stores that sell all sorts of lumberjack paraphernalia from cleated boots to chain saws. In the spring the two rivers that meet in the center of Rovaniemi, the Ounas and the Kemi, are impassable because so many logs are being floated southward.

The redesigned city and the spare, lean Rovaniemi parish church with its vast, impressive altar mural of Christ in a cloudy Heaven was planned by Alvar Aalto, who then farmed it out to other architects, leaving its civic center, Lappia House, to himself. This poured-concrete, glass-domed complex houses an extensive library, Finland's northernmost theater, and a Lapland bird and mineral collection. Inside and out, it is worth a visit.

More mundane is the "Trading Post," which sits precisely on the Arctic Circle five minutes outside of the city. A must stop for the busloads of tourists, it contains souvenir shops as well as a small log cabin that was built in just six days in 1950 as a guesthouse for Eleanor Roosevelt, who flew to Lapland to monitor the reconstruction of Rovaniemi. "They were hanging the door when her plane landed," said a caretaker with a grin. There is also a pole just outside from which hangs a sign reading, "Napapiiri, Polcirken, Polar Kreis, Arctic Circle," and visitors stand beside it to receive their Arctic Circle certificates and to have their pictures taken.

But not far away is a stretch of fir forest, which hides the Teno River and an underground spring-fed lake. One evening we went there, to a huge, caulked log cabin called Karhunpesä, or "Bear's Den," where we sat before a burning pine log fire, sipped wine, and ate reindeer tongue in aspic and large pieces of a thirty-pound salmon that had been caught only an hour earlier and grilled slowly over smoldering coals — but not before we perspired in the cabin's sauna repeatedly and then dashed down to the lakefront and dived into the cold water. The after-dinner fire and the touch of cloudberry liqueur that accompanied it were a most welcome, and admirable, prelude to our midnight return to Rovaniemi, with the sun shining in the night sky.

Early the next day we flew south from the forests of Lapland back to the boulevards of Helsinki. Aptly enough my first visit that morning was to the Museum of Finnish Architecture, where the exhibit was of inground and log structures built during the lean years of World War II. The logs, the earth, the roughness of the terrain brought Lapland back to me with a rush. We had Arctic Bramble ice cream in an Art Deco establishment called the Casino on Helsinki's outskirts, and then I went a-marketing, first to the Hakaniementori, an old two-story food market in an elaborate brick building in the northern part of the city, then back to Market Square and Helsinki's meat market. It was again sampling time.

At Hakaniementori I ate a lovely bread lanttukukko, stuffed with roast pork and a duxelles of mushrooms; smoked mackerel liberally dotted with peppercorns; and a white, flat, mozzarella-like cheese called aito pohjalainen juustoleipa, not to mention powdered sugar-covered donitsi. Then I hopped aboard a tram and made my way back to the meat market housed in an 1889 peaked building on the shore from which the ferry sails out to Suomenlinna. This is still another Russian-era building, with a very high corrugated tin roof supported with thin steel struts and cables. The individual stalls are quite ornate, with knobs, moldings, and newels all of wood, all brightly enameled, all framing the names of the meat purveyors — Kosonen, Neumat, Roslund, Kulinaris. And in front of them lay sianliha, smoked pork, boudins and special Medwurst, white-breasted chickens raised without pens and called kananliha, a special knackwurst called Suomi-lenkki, very little beef, which is not all that common in Finland, and packages of reindeer meat.

The market visits were a perfect prologue to my last night in Finland, a feast at the Kalastajatorppa, that "Cottage of the Fisherman," which consisted of platters of boiled, peppery crayfish, a smooth fish mousse napped with a crayfish-based sauce, and bowls of strawberries. And darned if we didn't take our glasses of lakka, the golden liqueur made from cloudberries, and walk out onto a pier to look at the moon reflected in the waters of Laajalahti. Along about this time I had become somewhat adept at bits of basic Finnish, especially "kiitos," or thank you, simply because of the generosity I had experienced. I had learned that Finns teach foreigners to say "kippis" when toasting, but say "hei" or "terveydeksi" when cheering each other. I also discovered that Finns do not say thank you to a host or a friend for a visit or a kindness. Instead, when next they meet, they say, "kiitoksia viimeisest," or "thank you for the last time." I'd like to say that.

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