Imatra

Imatra (population ca. 30,000) is an industrial town in South Karelia. It is dominated by Lake Saimaa, the River Vuoksi and the Finnish-Russian border. Imatra’s over 300-year-old history of busy tourism is greatly attributed to the attraction of the spectacular rapids of the river Vuoksi which have enticed many illustrious personas to visit the area throughout the ages. Visitors have included such people as Russian Empress Catherine II, Alexander Dumas Senior and Richard Wagner.

Imatra rapids and power plant lit up by night

Get in

By car

Imatra is situated about 250 kilometers northeast from Helsinki and the trip takes about three hours, depending on which of three most viable routes is chosen. The town is situated near the Russian border and you can cross the border at Svetogorsk just 7 km from Imatra.

By plane

Scheduled flights to the nearby Lappeenranta Airport (IATA: LPP, ICAO: EFLP) have been on and off at various times, so you may need to check its webpage for the current situation. There is also the historically significant Immola Airfield (ICAO: EFIM) in the northern part of the town. Your best bet, though, would be to fly into Helsinki and travel the rest by bus or train.

By train

Trains between Helsinki and Joensuu stop at Imatra. The duration of the trip is about three hours and there are about ten daily departures. From Russia, it's a bit more complicated; get off at Vainikkala at the Finnish side of the border, take a bus to Lappeenranta and from there by bus or train up to Imatra.

By bus

Another alternative is to travel by bus. Timetables for normal intercity buses can be found at Matkahuolto's website. Also budget bus company Onnibus connects to Helsinki, Kouvola and Joensuu among others.

By boat

Lake Saimaa can be reached from sea through the Saimaa Canal.

Get around

Downtown can be covered by foot or bike. The city also has a small public bus network of six lines. The other alternatives are car and taxi.

See

In poetry

Imatra is even mentioned in the Kalevala, the epic poem of Finland (compiled from oral poetry in 1835):
"Three, the water-falls in number,
Three in number, inland oceans,
Three in number, lofty mountains,
Shooting to the vault of heaven.
Hallapyora's near to Yaemen,
Katrakoski in Karyala;
Imatra, the falling water,
Tumbles, roaring, into Wuoksi"

  • 🌍 Imatrankoski Rapids. These rapids are Finland's first ever tourist attraction. The Russian Empress Catherine the Great and her retinue visited the rapids in 1772. Next to the rapids is hotel resembling a medieval knight's castle - the Imatran Valtionhotelli. The original name of the hotel was Grand Hotel Cascade d'Imatra. 
  • 🌍 Kruununpuisto Park. The oldest nature park in Finland, occupying the area around the Imatrankoski Rapids, was founded in 1842 by order of Tsar Nicholas I. 
  • 🌍 Church of the Three Crosses (Kolmen ristin kirkko) (in Vuoksenniska district). Open: 1 Sep - 31 May daily 10AM - 3PM, 1 Jun - 31 Aug daily 9AM - 8PM.. 

Do
  • Go 90's: 1–2 July 2016. Festival focusing on 90's music (date needs updating)
  • Imatra Big Band Festival. 
  • Rock to the River. Rock festival. 

Buy

You can find all sorts of small shops in the 🌍 pedestrian area (along and next to Koskenparras street). If you prefer shopping malls, head to the 🌍 Mansikkala district, where you can find Rajamarket, Lidl, Citymarket and a new (as of December, 2018) Prisma.

Eat
  • 🌍 Buttenhoff, Koskenparras 4, ☎ +358 5 476 1433. Monday - Friday: 11AM-11.30PM Saturday: noon-11.30PM. 100 seat upscale restaurant. Á la Carte menu consists of Finnish, French and Russian dishes. Fair selection of European wines and beers. During lunch hours Buttenhoff has business-lunch selection with salads, soups, main course and coffee included in the same price. During the summer months, if the weather allows, you can also opt for a table outside by the Koskenparras pedestrian street. 
  • 🌍 Ravintola Xiangfu, Tainionkoskentie 10, 55100, ☎ +358 5 436 80. Currently the only Chinese food serving restaurant in Imatra. Fast and easy lunch offered on weekdays for 8 €. Beyond lunch hours serves good Chinese style dishes, but prices tend to be a bit high. 
  • 🌍 Kent Pizza & Steakhouse, Koskenparras 7. Really hungry? This restaurant at the pedestrian zone offers huge pizzas, steak and kebab servings that would feed three. €8-20, lunch specials for €10. (updated Sep 2015)

Drink

Sleep

Budget
  • 🌍 Hotelli Imatra, Kanavakatu 9, ☎ +358 10 666 5700, fax: +358 10 666 5709. This new economy hotel is situated only 500 meters from the famous Imatra Rapids and the center of Imatra town. Hotels motto is: Sleep and save. Very good breakfast, large rooms and sauna. 

Mid-range

Splurge
  • 🌍 Imatran Valtionhotelli, Torkkelinkatu 2, ☎ +358 5-625-2000. The offputting name of the Imatra State Hotel hides a wealth of history: this castle-like hotel by the Imatrankoski rapids was built in 1903 for Russian nobility, and for several generations of Finns a suite here was the place to spend your honeymoon. Now privately run, the hotel was reopened in 2005 after extensive renovation and is, by Finnish standards, surprisingly cheap. Even if you don't stay overnight it's worth seeing from the outside. 95€-. 

Go next
  • Lappeenranta - Imatra's bigger cousin with a fortress and better shopping.
  • Punkaharju - The ridge bisecting Lake Saimaa is one of the most famous Finnish landscapes.
  • Savonlinna - A medieval castle, an opera festival and freshly fried fish.
  • Russia - If you have a valid visa (or if you don't need one), Svetogorsk is close by. If you only have a passport, during the summer months, you can travel to Lappeenranta and take a visa free cruise along the Saimaa Canal to Vyborg.


gollark: As well as having special casing for stuff, it often is just pointlessly hostile to abstracting anything:- lol no generics- you literally cannot define a well-typed `min`/`max` function (like Lua has). Unless you do something weird like... implement an interface for that on all the builtin number types, and I don't know if it would let you do that.- no map/filter/reduce stuff- `if err != nil { return err }`- the recommended way to map over an array in parallel, if I remember right, is to run a goroutine for every element which does whatever task you want then adds the result to a shared "output" array, and use a WaitGroup thingy to wait for all the goroutines. This is a lot of boilerplate.
gollark: It also does have the whole "anything which implements the right functions implements an interface" thing, which seems very horrible to me as a random change somewhere could cause compile errors with no good explanation.
gollark: - `make`/`new` are basically magic- `range` is magic too - what it does depends on the number of return values you use, or something. Also, IIRC user-defined types can't implement it- Generics are available for all of, what, three builtin types? Maps, slices and channels, if I remember right.- `select` also only works with the built-in channels- Constants: they can only be something like four types, and what even is `iota` doing- The multiple return values can't be used as tuples or anything. You can, as far as I'm aware, only return two (or, well, more than one) things at once, or bind two returns to two variables, nothing else.- no operator overloading- it *kind of* has exceptions (panic/recover), presumably because they realized not having any would be very annoying, but they're not very usable- whether reading from a channel is blocking also depends how many return values you use because of course
gollark: What, you mean no it doesn't have weird special cases everywhere?
gollark: It pretends to be "simple", but it isn't because there are bizarre special cases everywhere to make stuff appear to work.
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