Oulussa

The weather in Oulu was really sunny, even though the air was still cold, so I took my warm jacket, a scarf and I should maybe have taken my cap with me.
So when the sun was shining directly and the place was protected from the wind, a t-shirt was sufficient, at the beach it wouldn’t have been On the main market square near to the harbour a lot of people were sitting outside in the cafés, enjoying the weather. Just like in August two years ago, but there the temperature was 20°C more …

Like the last time I’ve been in Oulu, that’s been in winter, I walked from the city center over a few small, beautiful islands towards Nallikari, the ‘big’ beach on an island in front of Oulu.

As you can see, the trees were not as green as in Tampere, even though it had already been once 20°C, in the beginning of may. Near to the Nallikari beach there is this funny tower, from which one can look over the whole beach (and all factory chimneys of Oulu). Nobody was yet swimming there anyway.

On my way back to the city center leaving Nallikari at its north, I found one of the many ice selling wagons which was already opened, even though I havn’t seen there anybody buying ice but me. I guess I ate ice almost every day on my trip in finland

When I arrived at Huupisaaret, a small park with a lot of white bridges the waterlevel was surprisingly high. Places where you normally could walk were under water, trees just standing in the water.

Arriving at the power station the reason was clear they open the main gates only a few times a year, so also a lot of people stood there just watching the water.
I met an old man next to the ‘stairs for the fishes’, who was just on the way back home from the city center and still had 8km to go. Even though it was quite loud, it was possible to talk, but it was interesting how he talked to me. So either that was his way of talking simple finnish with some foreigner, or using mostly ‘sentences’ without verbs or other unnecessary stuff was normal for him. Anyway, interesting to see how extremely you can still shorten the already often quite short finnish sentences without loosing too much information

The fountains in the river were also not so lively and high as usual, normally it’s maybe about 2m high, now, that the waterlevel was so high, they hardly managed to be visible:

In the evening we then cooked minced elk meat, aubergine, zucchini, mushroom – cream sauce with pasta. The rest of it was used the next day for further creative but yet successful and tasty experiments

… and working a bit throught alex and my cd collection, whereas my was only represented by my mp3player and viikate, olavi uusivirta (ja sometimes paula vesala), scandinavian music group, and alex reminded me of ultra bra, showed me an emma salokoski album, quintessenz, and a lot of stuff I already forgot … and the sun was again somehow confusing my feeling for the actual time of day, as usual.

• Pictures in the gallery
• The next day: the last day before leaving to Kuopio.
• back to overview post for this finland trip