Art and friendship

This is the opening of the new blog year 2016. The first blog is story about the nice moment with the friend.

Last Saturday I had made an appointment with Zarah. We had three goals. To find shoes for Zarah, to see the exhibition of the famous French photographer HenriCartier-Bresson and, of course a little time for chat in some nice cafeteria.

It had been really cold last few weeks. So I had quite a warm winter coat and thick pants and cardigan. When I drove to Helsinki I noticed the thermometer showed plus two Celsius. Luckily I was sweating  neither outdoors nor indoors.

In front of the Ateneum art museum and the Finnish National Theater in the opposite direction

We met in the City of Helsinki in the afternoon in front of the Finnish national art museum Ateneum.  There were rather long queue, so we decided to go to the shoe shop first. For Zarah the royal shoe acquirer is Kenkä-Marski by the main street Mannerheimintie. She found her Högl pumps quite quickly with an assistance of a friendly sales lady.

                                  By the Kenkä-Marski Shoe shop, the Swedish Theater behind me

After such a quick and successful purchase we had time for our coffee and tea with delicious Sacher cake at a lovely cafeteria Bulevardin kahvisalonki. We hadn’t met since October so we had a lot of stories about our Christmas and other issues.

After that we went back to Ateneum. The queue had disappeared and we were quickly in to see the exhibition.  Cartier-Bresson had an extraordinary eye for photographical and esthetic things and on the other hand he had a marvelous skill to tell stories via his pictures. The exhibition was huge and we totally miscalculated the time we could be there before the place was closed. But as everything else in Finland, Ateneum was closed early on Saturday because of the official sauna time. And according this schedule I drove back home where my spouse had already heated the sauna.