I scored some great fare on Finnair to Seoul with an overnight layover in Helsinki in late August, 8 days solo.
I am looking at doing 3 days + the last day in Seoul and the rest somewhere else in the country, by train, also love hiking.
If anyone has any suggestions that would be great, as well as what is best to see in Helsinki in a half a day
There's not a whole ton of interesting stuff in Helsinki...
It's half an hour by train to the main station; an ABC 24h ticket costs €12.80 and will get you from the airport to the main station and then on
all public transport around the city.
Our main tourist thing is
the Suomenlinna fortress, 15 minutes by ferry, which you can easily spend a couple of hours wandering around and going "ooh!" at.
As a library lover, I have to recommend the
Oodi central library, right next to the main station. Its three floors each have their own purpose: from books to 3D printers to Xboxes to laser cutters to robots to cafés, it shows the Finnish social+architectural mindset in a nutshell. Tom Scott even made
a video about it.
From a public transport point of view, our tram system is 135 years old and offers, in my biased opinion,
some of the best trams in the world. It serves every corner of the main city area and is a great way to explore and get around. Our metro system is the world's northernmost and is pretty new (1982, extended in 2017+2022) and kinda unimpressive, but we do have
some lovingly refurbished '80s metro trains and some of the newer stations have half-decent art. We also have
a nice new orbital light rail line and
the last of 3 brand new tram-only bridges will open to pedestrians+bikes in the summer (but not yet trams), if you like your cool infrastructure projects. Oh, and we have buses.
There are some nice markets and some pretty good art museums (Ateneum, Amos Rex) if you like that sort of thing, plus some various interesting churches/cathedrals for various flavours of Christianity. There's also
a small tram museum if you need to kill 5 or 10 minutes.
