Helsinki Airport

Opera & ballet at Helsinki Airport + Giant miniature house at Indianapolis Airport

Art, Uncategorized, ,

Helsinki Airport shows ballet & opera snippets

The Stuck at the Airport team is a big fan of Helsinki, Finland. And not just for the licorice.

We love the airport too.

And we’re delighted to learn that passengers traveling through Helsinki Airport (HEL) can now enjoy snippets of opera and ballet from the Opera House in Helsinki.

Audio and video selections from performances are projected on a giant wall at the airport train station.

The first set of snippets includes highlights from the ballets Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty and the operas Tosca, Turandot and Don Giovanni. The run time is about 20 minutes and the program selections will be refreshed regularly.

We’re putting this in the running for Airport Amenity of the Week.

Indianapolis Int’l Airport displays a replica of a President’s house

Here’s another fun installation at an airport.

(Courtesy IND Airport)

The home of Benjamin Harris, the 23rd President of the United States, is a popular tourist destination near downtown Indianapolis.

And now an intricate replica of Harrison’s house created by miniaturist Jimmy Landers is on display in the pre-security Civic Plaza at Indianapolis International Airport (IND).

The replica is nearly six feet long, three feet wide and four feet tall. It includes more than 40 windows, eight porch columns, four chimneys and real slate roofs.

The original home was built with 380,552 bricks. The replica has 48,000.

The original structure cost $29,000 (over $800,000 in 2024 dollars). The cost of building the replica was about about half as much: $15,000.

5 Things We Love About HEL – Helsinki Airport

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Beyond, or perhaps we should say despite, its great airport code – HEL- Helsinki Airport, operated by Finavia, offers travelers some charming and thoughtful amenities in its new main terminal.

Here are some snaps from a tour on our way home from a week exploring Finland after joining Finnair on the first flight from Seattle to Helsinki.

Here are 5 of the amenities we loved.

Welcome to Helsinki

Passengers entering the arrivals hall – and those waiting for their friends or loved ones to arrive – are greeted with a calming indoor garden with live plants.

Thoughtful, automatic sanitizing

Is that handrail clean? In most airports, we don’t know. But at Helsinki Airport you can grab on with confidence because the handrail is automatically sanitized all the time.

Art with a sense of place

‘Aukio’ (by Gate 40) is an oasis where passengers can wind down and experience Finnish nature.

The curved 360° LED screen is a projection, soundscape, and interactive wall offering a journey through Finland’s nature and its four seasons. The landscapes change every 10 minutes, the speakers play nature sounds, and an interactive screen lets visitors create art with snowflakes, the Northern Lights, or autumn leaves.

Souvenirs

Airport shops offer everything from Finnish clothing and accessories by Marimekko to licorice-flavored liquors, reindeer pate, and bear meat. (If that’s your thing…)

Christmas Cabin

Santa’s year-round home is in Finland, Finns and others will tell you. So it makes sense that Helsinki Airport has a Christmas Cabin right there in the terminal.

Inside is a faux sauna, a storybook, Scandinavian-style furniture and decorations, and a Book of Names so that Santa knows who has been good or bad.

Greetings from: Helsinki

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Snaps from Finnair’s Inaugural Flights from SEA to HEL

Finnair is the latest new international carrier to serve Stuck at the Airport’s home base airport in Seattle.

We were delighted to hop on the inaugural flight from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) to Helsinki Airport (HEL).

And, yes, we love that we can tell people we can now fly directly from Seattle to HEL(L).

(Courtesy Port of Seattle)

Flights to SEA to HEL now operate three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, using an Airbus A330.

Here are a few more snaps from the gate celebration on June 1, some of the inflight amenities, and a few places we visited early in our Helsinki visit.

Thanks to Finnair for taking us along.

Cookies to celebrate the Inaugural Finnair Flight from Seattle to Helsinki

Souvenirs from the inaugural flight include cookies and luggage tags. For some passengers we met in the gate area before the flight, these were the only clues that they had booked seats on new service from SEA.

Combined with the champagne or blueberry juice welcome drink and the Marimekko amenity kit for business class passengers, this was a very festive welcome.

SEA airport sent off this inaugural flight with two congratulatory cakes for the crew, which they generously shared with passengers.

In Helsinki

We’ll have more time to explore the airport on our way home but we are encouraged to see bright spaces and artwork greeting passengers on arrival at the recently-upgraded terminal.

Licorice in Finland

Salted licorice (salmiakki) is a popular treat in many Nordic countries and a ‘you love it or you hate it’ treat for visitors from other countries. The StuckatTheAirport.com team loves it. And we were pleased to find a candy store not far from our hotel filled with licorice varieties we’d never seen or tasted before.

 

Helsinki Attractions

We’ll share more photos over the next few days, but with charming guides from Visit Helsinki, a group of Seattle-area journalists has been roving around the town.

Rock Church

Temppeliaukio Church is, understandably, one of Helsinki’s major tourist destinations because this Lutheran Church was carved out of solid rock, lined with copper, and covered with a UFO-like dome.

Helsinki’s central library – Oodi

Photo by Tuomas Uusheimo, Courtesy Helsinki Partner

Helsinki’s Central Library – Oodi – has books, of course. But this sprawling, welcoming space also serves as a community center and resource palace with everything from an outdoor terrace and cafes, to work and meeting spaces, recording studios with loaner instruments, play areas for kids, 3-D printing stations, sewing machines, and seemingly anything you might want to use or try out.

We love the spiral staircase, a work of art decorated with hundreds of words describing the wide variety of users that the public suggested the library should be dedicated to.

HELSINKI ART MUSEUM – HAM

The Helsinki Art Museum – HAM – is hard to miss with this giant seagull head outside. We’ve yet to make our way inside the building. But because about half of the 9,000 works of art in HAM’s collection are located in public spaces, we’re able to enjoy the museum’s offerings as we walk around town.

We’ll be back with more sites and spottings from Helsinki tomorrow.

(Photos by Harriet Baskas unless otherwise noted)

Put your name on Helsinki Airport. Plus more airport & airline news.

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Want an airport named after you? It’s easy. In Finland

Dulles International Airport. John F. Kennedy International Airport. Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport.

It’s a big deal to have an airport named for you.

In Finland, though, anyone can have Helsinkin Airport named for them. At least for a few moments.

Finavia Corporation, which manages Finland’s airport network has created a way for anyone to have their name put on the front of the Helsinki Airport terminal buildl long enough to snap a selfie or two.

Here’s how to make it happen for you.

Go to www.myhelsinkiairport.fi, put your name in the form, and hit submit.

Your entry will be reviewed to make sure it’s not off-color or inappropriate. And then, depending on how many requests are in ahead of you, your name will appear over the Helsinki Airport sign on the front of the terminal.

We tested it out and filled out the form early morning Finland time from Seattle. Then we watched on the website as our name popped up on the airport sign within seconds.

Unfortunately, of course, we couldn’t get a selfie with our sign because were weren’t standing out in front of the airport in person. But we’re determined to get there so we can get that snap.

In the meatime, we’re declaring this Airport Amenity of the Week. Agree?

Holidays at Airports and in the Air

We’re gathering up news of holiday events and amenities being rolled out by airports and airlines.

Here are a few to round out the week.

Let us know what we’re missing at your airport.

Airports and Airlines offer COVID-19 Tests

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 Organizations representing airports and airlines, including the International Air Transport Association (IATA), are calling for rapid COVID-19 testing for passengers at airports as an alternative to quarantine measures or bans on international travel.

“The key to restoring the freedom of mobility across borders is systematic COVID-19 testing of all travelers before departure, said Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s Director General and CEO. “This will give governments the confidence to open their borders without complicated risk models that see constant changes in the rules imposed on travel,” he adds.

Most groups are calling for some sort of government agency or coordination for this tests. But in the meantime, airports and airlines are coming up with testing programs on their own.

United Airlines’ offering COVID-19 tests for Hawaii-bound passengers. Brace for the fee.

Starting October 15, customers traveling on United Airlines flights from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to Hawaii will be able to take either a rapid COVID-19 test at the airport or a self-administered mail-in test at home.

This pilot program is timely and welcome because both residents and visitors arriving from out-of-state to Hawaii are still subject to a mandatory 14-day quarantine. But starting October 15, arriving travelers will be exempt from the quarantine if they have written confirmation of a negative test result secured within 72 hours from their final leg of their departure.

How will the tests work and what will they cost?

The test at SFO airport will be a rapid Abbott ID NOW COVID-19 test administered by GoHealth Urgent Care and partner Dignity Health. Passengers can make an appointment at the testing site in the international terminal on the day of their flight. Testing site hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.

The cost is $250. Certainly not cheap. But results should be available in about 15 minutes.

The mail-in test option is less expensive – $80, plus shipping. Still not cheap. This test is offered by a company named Color. They recommend customers order the test kit at least 10 days before their trip so they can send in a sample at least 72 hours before they fly. Results are delivered via email or text.

COVID-19 Testing by Dog

Meanwhile, Finland’s Helsinki Airport now has a team of specially-trained dogs on duty whose job it is to sniff out passengers who may be infected with COVID-19.

Tests conducted by University of Helsinki find that dogs can smell the COVID-19 virus with almost 100% certainty, according to a statement from the airport. The trained dogs can also identify the virus days before the symptoms have even started and from a much smaller sample than tests used by other methods.

“The difference is massive, as a dog only needs 10-100 molecules to identify the virus, whereas test equipment requires 18,000,000.”