Hi! The weekend of week 4 was a rather packed one: we caught a movie at the cinema and went to visit some art exhibitions; we are definitely not letting our shortening daylight hours go to waste before winter comes!

Having not seen the movie Crazy Rich Asians back in Singapore, some of us went to give the movie experience in Finland a try. We watched it on a Saturday, which proved to be rather expensive (€14.50, ~S$22.50), but the movie experience was rather enjoyable! Of note though is that the prices on weekdays are cheaper: €12.50 for adults and €9 for students, though it may still seem pricey if you compare it to back home. Though the theatre was rather small as compared to even the smaller ones at popular cinema locations such as NEX in Singapore, the seats were spacious and comfortable. The movie was subtitled in Finnish and Swedish though, so those who could not understand dialect missed out on some lines in the movie. That was to be expected though! There also seems to be some larger theatres, so we might hopefully catch a movie in one of these in the coming months!

Group photo between exhibitions

On Sunday, several of us went to two art exhibitions: the Amos Rex Museum for the teamLab exhibition, and Reflektor Helsinki 2018 at night for a lights exhibition. The teamLab exhibition featured art that was made possible with technology, such as this really cool domed section that featured a swirling vortex all around us, that seemed to disappear into a black hole. What made it even more special was that this exhibition was unique to Finland (you might have seen a teamLab exhibition in Singapore some time back) due to the venue’s structure required to portray it! Another exhibition that we were awed by was this dark room that visitors were guided into in groups, which featured crows chasing each other around through the sky, with projections all around us to allow us to follow the action. It was a bit disorienting for some of us, but it was really interesting because the paths the crows took were not actually pre-programmed, but were dynamically generated as the chase went on!

Vortex Exhibition by teamLab

In the evening, we made our way to Reflektor Helsinki 2018, which was a lights exhibition quite a distance away from the city center. We almost got lost trying to locate it as Google Maps led us to walk in the wrong direction! Luckily for us though, we managed to spot people walking towards the train station from a certain direction, so we went towards where they came from and found the place after some walking. One of the more interesting exhibitions involved prisms placed in a circular fashion, with light ray(s) coming from the sides of the circle, forming a spectacular (albeit small) light show. The different colours seen as the light sources rotated around the circle reminded us of physics in Freshmore year (the horror!). Another rather interesting exhibition was the projection of a scene onto the walls of a house that made it seem like something out of a horror movie. An eyeball could be seen peering through a hole in the walls of the old dilapidated house, and long, thin arms could also be seen waving about through the cracks in the house.

Prisms!

All in all, we had a really fulfilling weekend checking out some of the more “artsy” stuff in Helsinki. The movie was a comfortable experience and the art exhibitions turned out to be even better than we expected. There are definitely a lot of things to check out in Helsinki, especially if you are interested in the arts and cultural aspects of Finland!

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