Here are a few to do tips in Helsinki for the next weeks or so:
Restaurant Day, (ravintolapäivä) tomorrow, May 21st turns the city to an open-air restaurant. Anyone wishing to do so can run a pop-up restaurant for a day, on every other day, the hygiene & other regulations forbid this. This link should give you a list of restaurants for the search term ”Helsinki”. One special suggestion: Decker villa in Laajasalo open 10-17 (or thereabouts), vegetarian food. The address provided is Adelenkuja 2, but the map services do not recognise it, so head for Aino Acktén huvila, and it is the light yellow villa closer to the bus stop, in the middle of the Tullisaari park.
The Helsinki International Ballet competition May 24th to June 2nd. See tomorrow’s stars today.
World Village Festival (Maailma kylässä) May 28th – 29th in Kaisaniemi. Music and food from all around the world.
Cleaning day (siivouspäivä) May 28th, turns the city to a huge flea market. Anyone can put up a table for selling unnecessary things pretty much anywhere, checkout the exact rules from the link provided.
Helsinki Day (Helsinki-päivä) June 12th, a free open-air concert featuring brightest stars in the pop world, theatre, dance and much, much more. For a quick intro of the pop stars, check Finnish pop music as a guide to Finnish (and the Finns)
Eero Aarnio exhibition at the design museum. It is on until September 25th, but time flies, so make sure you use this opportunity to get acquainted with his work. The exhibitions at the design museum are often very good, I find myself going there much more often than I would anticipate.
Please also note that the program for
Tuska-festivaali, the local heavy metal happening July 1-3 has been out a while, if you want to get tickets, this is a good time to do so.
The same goes for Helsingin juhlaviikot (Helsinki Festival) in August/Sept. Particularly the Viapori Jazz program looks good, for background on the Finnish Jazz scene check Jazz in Helsinki / Pori Jazz festivals.
Here’s a general info about buying tickets to cultural events.