The Turning Torso is, with it’s 190 meters (623 feet) and 54 stories, the tallest building in Sweden when created, but also one of the most spectacular with it’s crazy 90 degrees twisting of the 9 cubes in the tower from top to bottom and irregular pentagonal shaped floors rotating around the vertical core.

A true artwork in structural expressionism by Santiago Calatrava (follow the link to read more about this fantastic engineers work!) from 2005, inspired by his own sculpture called the Turning Torso which the Swedish contractor saw and asked him to copy his design as a building.

Featured in Discovery channel’s TV program, Extreme Engineering – always so incredible fascinating – where they did show how a floor of this twisted tower was constructed. It’s also built with sustainability and an environmentally friendly way of life in mind and the building is supplied only with locally produced and renewable energy.

Santiago Calatrava (from Valencia in Spain) is considered to be one of the worlds elite designers who has won gold medal’s. A truly gifted structural engineer with an unusually artistic approach in his creations! I’m totally blown-away by several of his other architectural wonders too.

He also contributed (but did not won) in the architectural competition for the Swedish Öresund Bridge in the nearby area, which we had to pass over to get from Sweden to Denmark on our next leg of Lifecruiser Europe trip…

©Lifecruiser Love Unusual Architecture
 

It’s definitely all about the moment, to catch so called “Kodak photo moments”. I love those kind of photos. Do you have any to share with us? Please do!

©Lifecruiser Love Cat Photos

Other farm cats photo posts by Lifecruiser:

Travel Photo: Holiday Fat Cat
Farm Photo: Morning Cat
Cat in Box, Gotland
The Farms Wild Cats
Visiting Farm Friends In Norway
 

Emergency Stop on the Kepler Trek in NZ by RobB7

This one above is another one, which we have seen some similar ones at different places and always up in the mountains. This one though is "secured" with wires if you look closer, that is supposed to keep it from falling over the edge…

Just think about the feeling when sitting in there and suddenly falling backwards with your pants down… The ultimate nightmare! Ha ha!

©Lifecruiser Love Toilets Travel Photos

Travel Toilet-related posts by Lifecruiser:

World Wide Weird Travel Toilets
Travel Photo: Mexican Toilet Sign in Spain
Travel Photo: Ingmar Bergmans Septic Tank
 

Not even their names. I wonder why? Surely they must have had any names. It feels very anonymous, don’t you think?

Though it was a very long time ago and maybe they did think otherwise back then, maybe the words father and mother were very strong for them and a tribute.

©Lifecruiser Love Unusual Photos
 

After the bad cruise experience at the budget cruise we escaped from, I was determent to make the ending of this trip great, so I made a reservation at a much better accommodation: The Katajanokka Hotel, a Best Western Premier Hotel – which actually is an old prison turned into a hotel!

No, it was not worse than that, we didn’t had to be locked in with only bread and water in a cold jail cell… ha ha… Though I must admit that at that time we really felt like disobedient teenagers on the run!

I was aiming for a room with Jacuzzi from the beginning, but kinda adapted to the country tradition of Finland: the junior suite with an own sauna in the room! How cool (or hot I mean) isn’t that???

The sauna of course demanded a use of the minibar in the room too, despite the fact that those can become quite expensive. One can’t skip the most important part of a Finnish sauna, right? After all, it was hubby’s birthday.

We had a really relaxing sauna before making us all handsome and dressed up (with our nice clothes we had been carrying around all trip to be used this special evening) for the dinner at the hotel restaurant: The Jailbird. Very suiting and interesting name, don’t you think?

So how was the jail food? Well, it didn’t come as a complete surprise for us that it was really excellent! That chef knows what he/she is doing and the ingredients used were very fresh too!

We started with a whiskey drink called Godfather (Scotch whisky and amaretto almond liqueur) for hubby and a modest glass of sparkling Cuarenta Cava for myself.

Hubby did consider Snails with Garlic and Angelica as a starter, but he wanted them to be in the shells and they were not, so he went for the Lobster Soup Flavored with Sherry instead. I did choose the Grilled Goat Cheese and Lettuce, because I just love goat cheese.

    

To go with the dinner we did drink a dry Austrian white wine of Rabl Gruner Veltliner, which went very well to our choice of courses.

For the main course hubby did choose the Grilled Lamb with Smoked Garlic Puree and Garlic Potatoes, since he love lamb and I went for the Glow Fried Salmon with Grilled Asparagus and Quinoa Salad, since I love salmon. Both were excellent.

    

Not to mentioning the staff, our own prison guard. I must admit that he must have been the best prison guard ever, giving us such a great service! Ha! He had humor too and you know how we love people with humor.

As a dessert I did choose a Champagne sorbet with strawberries – what else for a Champagne lover like me? Hubby were celebrated by our prison guard with a birthday cake in the shape of e Creme Brulee with a lightened candle in the middle! Surprise!

    

I’m very happy over the fact that we didn’t have to eat the same as the former prisoners: mostly soup and occasionally salted meat, for breakfast gruel or porridge. Once a week boiled potatoes and salted Baltic herrings…

- And no, we did not hear anything from any prison ghosts, no wandering about or making any noises, not even any knocking on the walls – to my disappointment… ha ha… I think that would have add up to the experience as well, don’t you?

Helsinki County prison years 1837 – 2002

Helsinki County Prison, called Nokka or Skatta was a pre-trial detention facility. Criminals were sent there from all around the Province of Southern Finland to wait for their trial, so more than 40 % of all prisoners in Finland was passed through this place. The prison also housed default prisoners, people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay their fines. the prison had 164 cells with 128 places for male and 7 places for female prisoners. In reality there could be more than 200 prisoners in the quarters at the same time. The cells were 7 m2 in size without toilet or shower.

Source: The Hotel Site of bwkatajanokka.fi

Ouch, that fact that there were no toilets would have been really devastating in my case, considering my "lock-up in the toilet experience" you could read about in the earlier post!

Click to see some more Lifecruiser Flickr Photos of Katajanokka Hotel and Jailbird Restaurant.

Stay tuned to read more about our sightseeing time in Tallinn and St Petersburg, which included an Idiot (or maybe more) and Russian Vodka!

©Lifecruiser Love Katajanokka Jailbird

Related Baltic cruise posts by Lifecruiser:

How we escaped from a cruise and ended up in jail… Part 1
How we escaped from a cruise and ended up in jail… Part 2
 

I’m a stubborn person (Finnish Sisu!) and won’t let anyone bully me or destroy my travel experiences for no reasons, so I just went obstinate thinking that we should create a nice ending on this cruise trip instead of being left with an unpleasant memory. Especially since it was a birthday involved…

We needed to find somewhere to stay for the night, somewhere really nice. Not so very easy when there is a sport event in town filling up the hotels with sport freaks… We stood there in the railway station searching and searching for a more luxury place to stay, when I found the perfect place for hubby on his birthday: a jail.

Yes, he should be locked in again! This time in a Finnish Jail and not a Swedish Jail. It was the perfect solution!

We had not done anything criminal at all, but we really did feel like teenagers on the run since normal grownups may not leave a booked cruise in the middle of it like we did. At least not all grownups…

Second thing we did were to explore the city until it was time to be locked in our jail, we are after all true explorers (even though we have already been to Helsinki many times). We did get some photos which you’ll get to see later too.

We did take a taxicab to the jail and while doing so I noticed that the driver was having a cold, he had a nose flow he tried to hide. (My old readers know about my bad luck with sickness during travel and understand why I instantly thought: oh no…! But I did shake it off my mind!)

It was in the night, in the jail, that I started to feel strange… No, it was not the fact that we were locked in a jail, more like the fact that I had to lock myself in at the toilet… Yep, it was now that undone breakfast buffe content from the cruise ship started to make themselves reminded.

I thought the sausages tasted strange, but ignored it because I was so tired that morning, tired of bad sleep and all the bad things happening. I should have known that you can’t ignore such things… it always has to come out!

…and it did. I actually paid 210€ to spend the night in that toilet… Though I was happy that at least I could be sick in style, this toilet were so much fresher than the one on the cruise ship! One has to love that fact! What a memory for life!

I’ll tell you all about the actual (nice) birthday celebration in the jail in another post with photos, so be sure to stay tuned to read more about our ehrm… interesting… experiences.

- Especially in the end of the week when we will tell you about our day in Tallinn and St Petersburg sightseeing, which included an Idiot (or maybe more) and Russian Vodka!

©Lifecruiser Love Cruises

Related cruise post by Lifecruiser:

How we escaped from a cruise and ended up in jail… Part 1
 

Nice butt? He he… The question is: where is the head…? No, there is no hole in the wall. Just a funny angle.

It shows the hard work of us photographers. The many odd positions we get into, to get the best shot of the photo object of choice….

©Lifecruiser Love Funny Photos

Other Lifecruiser headless related photo post:

Photo: Wordless or headless?
 

This travel photo above is from one of our days at Tenerife island in Spain when we had to give up sightseeing that day, luckily we had more days there. Another day we had fog all the way up on the road to the Teide volcano, but after just minutes after we arrived there, it cleared up around the peak and we succeeded to see it!

That was not the fact another time when we were on the most beautiful part of our bus tour in Southern Ireland and we got so severe fog that we literally could not see our hand in front of us… Yep, we totally missed one of Ireland’s most spectacular areas – The Ring of Kerry – and the weather still was bad when arriving to the famous Cliffs of Moher.

Luckily, we had a very experienced bus driver that said: lets drive to a nearby lunch place and eat lunch and have a short walk around and then come back on this road and if we’re lucky, the fog has disappeared by then. And it had, we could walk up the cliffs to admire the view.

When we should do sightseeing at the Tower in London, we also had severe fog – and rain, but that was not a complete surprise for us as London often can be…

Another very foggy place were when we were at the Niagara Falls – we could see them, but we had big problems taking any photos without destroying the cameras! We should have had waterproof camera cases. We did not have the same problem at all att the Iguazu Falls in South America at all.

The funny thing is: when we’ve traveled to places where we expect to meet bad weather, we have had great weather and when going to the opposite places, like beach vacations, we have had bad weather. Remember my bad weather curse?

That’s why I always like to have plenty of time for sightseeing, to have several opportunities to come back to a sight. Fog can’t stay around forever. Or can it?

©Lifecruiser Love Travel

 
Other travel related posts by Lifecruiser:

Our Ireland Trip
Costa Adeje Holiday Tips
Niagara Falls six years later
World Heritage Iguazu Falls, South America
Thursday Thirteen Travel Curse
 

My guess is that it used to be an ATM there before and that someone were having a bit fun here… ha ha…

©Lifecruiser Love Fun Travel Photos

Just the fact that the wall is dark, makes me think it’s extra ghostly and if taking a closer look at the dripstone wall, you can spot animals and monsters as well as some faces here and there.

The dripstone wall was made by Italians in the 17th century and is located in the Wallensteins garden below the Prague castle. We did not take any more pictures from the garden – the wall took all our attention!

Though we have already seen some of the sculptures by Adrian de Vries in the garden, since they are copies. The Swedish military confiscated them during the 30-years war and the originals are still in the Drottningholm Palace Park in Stockholm.

©Lifecruiser Love Unusual Walls