If you look up a list of the world’s most expensive buildings on Wikipedia, you will be quite disappointed. Spoiler alert – it’s full of factory buildings and nuclear power plants, with the occasional stadium sprinkled in. But wedged in there, just between the Tesla Gigafactory and the Airport of Singapore, you will find the Mall of Tripla – a shopping center located in northern Helsinki. Indeed, the Finnish fascination with indoor retail is an often overlooked part of the Finnish culture. But it makes sense: Given the frequent rain, low temperatures, and general gloominess of the Outside, who wouldn’t prefer to shop indoors?

In order to not go the way of every single failing mall in the United States, a Finnish shopping center is built to not only be a place for commerce, but also a transportation hub, a leisure center, a social meeting place, and generally an environment it is enjoyable to spend time in. The above-mentioned Mall of Tripla boasts a cinema, a museum, beach volleyball courts, a JumpIn-style kids play area, a beach bar with indoor surfing, and, of course, a sauna. Automated robots keep shopping centers clean and large touchscreen information boards help you find what you are looking for. And importantly, every major shopping center in the Helsinki area is built on top of a Metro or train station.

This gives me an idea on how to spend my first weekend in Finland. It is Saturday, the first breather from an intense week. Time for exploration! I have a few errands to run, a few things to buy, so my plan is to head to the center of Helsinki: Explore the city, while also tackling my overwhelming to-do list. And to make things a bit more fun, there will be one very important rule: The sky is lava. For the next eight hours, I will explore the capital of Finland without going outside.

I wave the sky goodbye as I step into the Metro station at Aalto university. Twelve minutes later, I exit at Kamppi, the first shopping center of the day. Six stories, bright, modern. The layout resembles a capital ‘T’, with the intersection point being a large open atrium spanning all floors with a colorful sculpture hanging from the ceiling. I give Kamppi a rating of 8/10. The passageway to our next shopping center, called Forum, almost feels like a shopping center itself. There are stores on either side and even a bowling center. Arriving at Forum, I find myself in a beautiful, open five-story shopping center surrounding a central plaza. Besides the ever-present escalators, a wide, spiral staircase is the main feature of this place. I am particularly confused when I see cars drive by immediately outside both when being on the third and fifth floor, 7/10.

It takes me some time to find the hidden passageway that leads to the central railway station. There, a fairly small and somewhat run-down shopping center spanning just two floors is built immediately beneath the main train platforms. From a large central square area, a number of passages lead in random directions. This place resembles a spider, with its arms reaching out to neighboring shopping centers. 4/10.

Following a path due south, a short walk brings me to the Citycenter Mall. There is a classic shopping center here, but surrounding it is a network of ‘normal’ houses, where the streets are covered by large glass panes, providing precious protection from the lava-sky. Kinda neat, 8/10. Reaching my final mall for the day is tricky, and the only way I found to do so is via the vast underground parking garage. On the very southern end, a long tunnel cut directly into the rock leads for almost half a kilometer all the way to Stockman. You exit in the middle of an electronics store, but that’s fine. It has a square layout, with four stories of balconies running around the edges. It is a weird mixture of modern and old, with the highlight being an actual paternoster lift, 6/10.

Summarizing the day on the train ride back home, I am content with leaving the record of shopping centers explored without being directly exposed to the sky at five. Surely, an expert in this field will be able to chain more malls than me, a mere mortal. There may be ways to reach Kluuvi, or even the Yliopisto Metro stop. Certainly, allowing for the use public transport would open up the category completely, allowing for access to places like Tripla, Sello, Ainoa, or Iso Omena, but that will have to be a challenge for another day.