You came to Helsinki for work, love, as a refugee or student or for other reasons and you call it your (new) home now. Your days are busy, you walk the city daily, know how to get around and you have your favorite places to hang out and meet people.

You are cracking your head learning Finnish, raising your kids, keep up with your family abroad via the Internet and maybe try to manage a culture shock. 

 

That's at least how it was for me. Maybe you are one of those lucky people who are not deeply influenced by a change in environment. Some people are sailing above water of a new place. Others, like myself, are deep divers. I have to hang on to something to make sense of a new location and not "drown" in the new impressions. Coffee helps 😊, but it’s not enough to stabilize my "buzzing senses" after a relocation. For me, music has been the anchor point, in Finland and everywhere else. It was a tremendous gift during my process of "kotoutuminen", as they call it here.

 

While I had already learned a lot about Finland during my 9 years in the countryside, not least the language, it was only after I moved to Helsinki and decided to become a tour guide that I started to grasp the "essence" of the place. As a new resident, you also might feel the wish to get to know Helsinki a little better. For me, music turned out to be an intuitive way into Finnish culture and life, 

 and I have created this online music tour so it could be a flexible companion for your busy "arkipäivä" in Finland as well.

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The full tour has 31 sights and 38 full length music pieces which you can access for 7 days, so you can check-out different places over the course of a week whenever you have time for a "breather". You can even listen to the music while doing your chores at home. Even if you know all the places, have walked by, some facts and stories might still be new to you. There are pictures to give different angles of a known place, and the music will hopefully be an inspiration to you, as it has been for me.

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Find out if this is for you by signing up below for a short free sample of the tour.

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Thank you for visiting and reading my story and I hope to meet you "inside", or personally in Helsinki during one of my tours "on the ground".

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 Joseann Freyer-Lindner