oulu walk this morning (two weeks ago)

These are images from this morning's long walk from where I'm staying, Kaarratie, to Kuljasilta and thence to the Oulu CBD. Once again for its own (no doubt good) reasons, blogger has uploaded the pictures time's arrow-style and once again, for reasons known only to me, I can't be bothered going through and swapping them all around to create the correct impression. I mean it's still all things that happened in the past, right? The further you go, the further back they happened in the past, so that kind of makes sense really doesn't it. This is the route I took to Karjasilta, anyway, more or less: 

This is, um, well, it's something I saw in the centre of town. I can't explain any of it. 

Centre of town. It was I guess around 8:30 am so things hadn't really started to get going yet. I bet it's turmoil now (9:12 am). 

I enjoyed these two doing their whatever-the-two-person-version-of-selfies is, under the nonsense bubble. 

Have you ever seen the timelapse video I did of these birds in 2011? I mean wow, can't believe you haven't seen that. Well, here they are from a different angle than in that video. You saw it here first. 

It was probably the same year, 2011, that I made a quite funny video about the school that this sculpture is out the front of. I'll try and dig that video up, see if I'm still pleased with it. 

I don't know what the Finnish interest (won't call it an obsession) with the American wild west is, at all, but it inflects this little playground. Yippie ki yay kusipäät!

I l.o.v.e. love though the particular buttoned-up nordic style of 'sheriffs office' though. Can't you just imagine some of the little Finnish kids, the ones with the big round owl glasses, just wanting to go and sit at a bench and shuffle papers on behalf of the sheriffi? 

Cool ragged house. 

Dog graffiti. 

A building which I think houses electrical infrastructure. This was also in my 2011 video and it hasn't changed a bit. 

Made a little (fair-weather) friend

Cemetery. It's probably too late to warn you that the first monument is actually really disturbing. 

So you'll remember we're going backwards here. The wall above was unexpected and inexplicable to me - it's the cemetery wall - because mapsonmyphone was really keen that I go straight through it, as per below...

As it transpired I walked around, path of least resistance, and I eventually found a way into the cemetery, and I still don't know whether there was a path like the one above that just happened to start on the other side of the wall, or not. I muddled through fine. 

OK so the buildings above, nice looking residential blocks in open space, come with this slightly confusing plaque. 'Intiön asuntoalue' means 'residential area of India'. They were built between 1973-83 (you could have figured that out), there are 554 homes and the companies that built them were the Postal Bank and a company called Sampo... I guess. 

You gotta love it. Well, I gotta. 

sunday morning in helsinki (two weeks ago) - part 2

So just after I wrote the preceding post, I went out for a coffee, and spoiler I got one and it wasn't at all bad, but anyway, I realised that Hotel Anna has a conference room, with an actual fax machine, isn't that glorious? Portrait of the author in the reflection in the glass. 

 

There is another non-ironic telephone (what they call locally an ei-ironinen* puhelin) on the shelf there. 

Above; view into the courtyard; below, the gloriously empty streets of Iso Roobertinkatu.

The sparrows (?) of Espresso House. (If they're sparrows as we English-speakers understand them, they're varpuset, but I am only sparrowising them for convenience). 

They left after they realised I had no pulli for them. 

I love this shop, and I have loved it previously in posts on this blog (go looking).** I will love it again after midday today I suspect (when it opens for Sunday trading). 

* The existence of the word 'ei-ironinen' suggests that there was no word for 'ironic' in Finnish before the word was appropriate/adapted from, I assume, English although wiktionary tells me it has Latin, Greek and French derivations. I can't believe there was no concept of irony in Finnish language/culture/society before this time though! Can't believe, so won't believe. 

** For instance, here, but go looking first please. 

sunday morning in helsinki (two weeks ago) - part one

Greetings to you from the Hotel Anna. I think I have actually stayed here twice before, or perhaps only once. Definitely I stayed a few days here on my first ever trip to Finland, which I believe was in 2011. It is old school, I suppose I hate that term as much as I hate any term which has kind of detached from its original wry or hip meaning, so that really people who use it actually just mean 'old' (ok well I guess they mean 'old but valid'?). For instance, my room has this phone in it, and I am pretty sure it's not even ironic:

I don't have a clue about the story of this hotel but when I see the other people staying here, in the breakfast room, I suspect they have been guided here by their valuing of proximity to the city and an eschewing of costly (faux-) luxury. I had a quick look at Tripadvisor expecting a swathe of 'never since I had my wallet stolen in Phoenix in 1981 and had to slum it in a run-down...' reviews - not a reflection on the place as I see it but on its resilient rejection of frippery - but there were none, which I can't interpret. 

I'm on the fifth floor, this is what I see out the window this morning (just before 9 am). Not bad. 

I had to have the window open as the room was quite warm when I got here, it wasn't uncomfortable. I was zonked, as they say, so although there were drunken gronks going past having super loud conversations (the last one just some young men bellowing, I know they were young because I looked out the window to see who was doing this, they had the faces of 80 year olds though) I wasn't that bothered. 

The big dumb thing about today is that whereas I was originally scheduled to get in on Saturday morning, in fact I didn't make it till Saturday evening - whole waste of a day - and things don't get started in a hurry in Finland on Sundays. You guessed it - this is depressing and embarrassing but just true - I can't handle the day without coffee. I had some coffee in the breakfast room but it was the coffee of non-coffee drinkers i.e. insufferably bland, I just had some the way junkies put water in their old needles hoping to get a little of the residue. So my next step is to go out and find an outlet for one of the cafe chains - Espresso House - which apparently is due to open in 8 minutes. Not 7, not 9 but 8. 

More anon.