tiedonjano-patsas (two weeks ago)

It's my last day in Oulu and I feel ready to go, though I certainly hope to be back again. My train to Tampere is in two hours. I am all packed and kind of unable to do anything in the airbnb because that would require putting something away or cleaning up or whatever. So I am perching. 

I saw on mapsonmyphone that there was a statue in a park north of here an hour's walk or so, so I figured, I'll go and see what on earth that could be. You already know what it is. 

The book is entitled Animals. 

The context is not lovely. There is a park, but all around is shopping centre/city square type infrastructure which sadly is a bit dead, though not entirely. Behind the statue (to the left of the top image, where you can't see it, and the building you can see in the next image) you can see a library (I don't know whether it's open/functioning). This ravintola is open though - you can get kebabit if you want. Or pizzit. 

However this place - Starburger - is empty and closed and so are the other businesses that once occupied this row of buildings, which are for sale. 

Wish I'd brought my deck

This would make a wicked tatuointi

I could get 'Myllytie for life' on the other shoulder. 

By the way, if your worldview has stretched adequately beyond a small street in northern Oulu that you don't know what Myllytie is, this is Myllytie. Of course it's for life. 

OK back to some peaceful landscapes denuded of people or at least of their idiocy. 

I was on a bus yesterday that went down what I thought was a footpath, I actually thought the bus driver must have taken a wrong turn or a short cut but no. Anyway this is similar situation - a narrow walkway that is also a bus route. Apparently. 

Once again Oulu I really only scratched your surface but I found it very satisfying. It was just a scratch. 

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.