All but one of the USA teams had the day off at the ITF World Team Championships today. The USA Men’s 60, Von Cramm Cup team advanced with a 3/0 win over Sweden to reach the semis.

Tomorrow the women’s 55 & 60 and men’s 60 play the semis; the men’s 50s play the quarters and the men’s 55 and women’s 50s have the day off. We play Germany around 2:30 tomorrow. The women’s 55 play at 10 and the men’s 60 at 9.

The women’s 55 & 60s team both practiced at 10 along with Vesna from the 50s for a couple of hours, then we went sight seeing. We took the public bus successfully back to the main bus terminal which is only five minutes from our apartment.

Susan, Vicki, Cindy, and I did a hop on hop off bus tour of Helsinki. It’s a compact city though and now we know where to go on foot. It would also be possible to traverse the city by bike I think and there are public bikes around in the city center.

We saw some cathedrals (the white one shown below was built for a Russian Tsar) and then got off at the waterfront and walked around, viewing the harbor. There’s a bit flea market here and a big fruit, vegetable and more market near the water too. We stopped by an ice cream shop and Susan and Vicki had some Finnish ice cream.

The official dinner was tonight. We had it at the Sokos Presidentti hotel and it was a nice buffet of traditional Finnish food which included lots of herring in various sauces, and reindeer stew over mashed potatoes which was quite good with some sort of berry sauce. The desert was some sort of mild cooked cheese with a fruit sauce…not really something that competes well with chocolate though!