I was in Finland’s second-oldest town, Porvoo, whose Finnish name came from local phonetic attempts to say its Swedish name, Borjå. Most Finnish places I visited along Finland’s southern coast have populations of Swedish speakers. Porvoo has a wonderful district of cobbled lanes and red, wooden houses that today receives growing numbers of visitors but a part of which, up the hill, in the 1960s and 70s was often referred to as the “Shanghai of the Nordic Countries,” for, apparently, the inherent danger to life and limb contained... Read More