Oulu

I first came to Finland in 2004 with Susan and Rosan, for a design conference in Helsinki. We loved Helsinki and still talk about it as a place we’d like to live someday. The Finns seem sufficiently melancholic and subliminally aware of everything around them that I think of them as a nation of telepaths. Where normally you might expect one person out of a hundred to take a good long look at you and get a mental impression, in Helsinki this is maybe one person out of ten. In Helsinki airport, for instance, I arrived in time to change to an earlier flight, so I spoke with a Finnish woman at the desk. She had to be eight month’s pregnant, and she came over to where I stood to one side, smiling at me sympathetically despite the hordes crowded around the front of her desk (you don’t get a seat assignment in a flight to Oulu). The cost turned out to be prohibitive for me ($75 to save 2 hours). “You have time then,” she said, “to go and get a decent meal.” I’m not sure if she actually said “last decent meal before flying into the remote North,” but that was how I understood her, so I went and did just that, eating a pizza made from reindeer, blue cheese, and a long, thick mushroom I didn’t recognize. The pizza was in the original Sicilian style, by which I mean uncut with a paper-thin crust, and the diced pieces of reindeer were very red, tasting a bit like bacon. It was delicious.

Breakfast in Oulu
Thank goodness I misunderstood about the food. The breakfast buffet here was included in the price of the room, and was good as any breakfast I’ve eaten in Scandinavia, which is saying a lot. There were four kinds of yogurt, for example, ten kinds of bread, and fruit compote involving fruits I don’t know anything about, one of which seemed to involve pine trees. I also had the pleasure of eating my first breakfast in Oulu with Susan H. and her husband Martin, who have been systematically traversing Earth now for several years, most recently north of here, where you can drive up to the Northernmost point in Europe that can be reached by car. They got there via the Norwegian fjords, which they say are definitely worth taking the ferry to float past.

Midnight Sun
Oulu is much closer to the Arctic circle than I’ve ever been before. I arrived at my hotel about 10:30 and it might have been late afternoon as far as the sun was concerned. I got up this morning at 7:30 and in terms of the sun, nothing has changed. They tell me that I can only expect a couple of hours of dusk in the middle of the night. It’s been heavily overcast though.

Finnish Design in my Room
Design in Finland is of course world-class, and my hotel room has several nice features. There’s a reclining couch by the large windows, several lights by the bed, including a red strip overhead and two reading halogens on flexible stalks. The closet in the entranceway also has a neon light strip, built right into the bar where you hang up the clothes.

Bunch of Cowboys
In the movie Armageddon, that’s how the Russian astronaut describes the American astronauts as they inadvertently go about destroying his space station. The phrase came to mind because of my bathtub, which is that kind I now think of as central European, because of my bathing adventures last fall in Krakow and Prague. These tubs remind me of the ones in old Westerns, where Jimmy Stewart is hanging out both ends with a bit of water in the middle. Whenever I wash, I feel that I am missing a cowboy hat. There is also the modern addition of a removable shower head on a cord, which inevitably adds that slapstick element.

What is it with the USSR?
While I’m on the Russian theme, Oulu does remind me in several ways of Poland, which I suppose has something to do with the history of the various regions. The highway signs, for instance, are similar, with silhouettes of towns turned off and on to mark the need for reduced speed on the highways, and my queen-sized bed is actually two single beds pushed together. The view from my window, in what I believe is the nicest hotel in town, includes a huge factory, belching steam from three smokestacks. Someone has a photo here, although from where I am I can’t see the water (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/5764906). I also have a government form to fill out, although when I mentioned I’d been traveling for more than 24 hours, the Finnish woman at the desk kindly suggested that I can do it at my leisure and drop it off sometime this morning. On a more positive note, I should also mention that there are little canals or rivers or something all over the place, with low stone arches over them, and right beside the hotel is a beautiful park, that you can reach by walking past the restaurant patio that overlooks the bay. Susan S. also tells me that the entire city is wireless.

Ducks in a Row
Kirsten U. and I took a walk in the park one day, taking the opportunity to talk at some length about land cartels, and the grounds were as lovely as advertised, with trees and shrubbery and flowers and little streams everywhere with charming footbridges built over them. The place also featured playgrounds for kids, as well as some greenhouses tucked away here and there. It seemed to be a favourite too with the wildfowl, and we saw a wide variety of the kinds of birds who swim. At one point, we watched half a dozen or more mature ducks climb one at a time out of the water and onto the grass. They were greenheads mostly, although there were a couple of hens mixed in. Once they emerged from the water, they did something I’d never seen in my life; they lined up single file and marched away over the lawn. It seemed so natural and spontaneous to me that I wondered if the expression for difficulty shouldn’t be the converse: “keeping your ducks from lining up.”

The Fat Man
When I announced that I was going to Oulu, Tom N. mentioned that there was a fat little policeman standing near the harbour, and sure enough, he turned out to be iconic for the city. He’s about eight feet tall and six feet across, and is there to honour the market police, who we saw in quiet action at midnight one night, when we were there to photograph a bunch of our colleagues clowning around the statue. Some of the local boys, beer in hand, came to join us, and so we took their pictures too. Nobody bothered about that, but a police van did pull up and the officers called a few people over for a chat. Everyone stands around in the street with alcohol in their hands, so apparently there’s no equivalent to the Canadian idea of an outdoor patio needing to be enclosed. The statue was commissioned in 1986 for the city from a gallery owner who’d previously made a smaller version. The sculptor’s name is Kaarlo Mikkonen, and this was his only public statue. Someone has a polite photo here, somewhat unlike the ones we were taking:
http://johnmartintaylor.com/images/dcp_3109h1.jpg

Vancouver

Susan and I were in town for a week to attend a couple of conferences. The Congress met last year in Saskatoon and was here at UBC this year. It is a ragtag collection of about 65 learned societies, whose members all get together once a year for a couple of weeks in the same spot. These are societies from the arts side of campus. The Congress this year was the biggest ever, with over 9500 delegates. My research teams gave papers at the Society for Digital Humanities, and Susan had a paper at the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. We had a simply wonderful time at these conferences, then spent our leisure hours wandering around this corner of the city, meeting some of the local flora and fauna.

A couple of raccoons
We went walking in the rain in Stanley Park, and were standing around under the cedar trees at one point, admiring their age and size, when who should stick her head out from around a tree trunk but a ratty wet raccoon. She stood on all fours and looked at us for a while, then stood up a little and showed us her empty hands. It finally occurred to Susan that she might be interested in a little dried fruit strip. While Susan was fetching that out, along came another, older raccoon, much less wet, and Susan fed the two of them the whole bar, tossing the pieces onto the ground in front of them. The older one rubbed the piece of fruit between her hands before eating it. After we finished and were walking away, I looked back to see them walking up the side of a cedar tree, like a couple of giant squirrels.

Water birds
The geese have their goslings and the ducks their ducklings, and you can walk right up to where they are. The family units mostly stick together, but there always seems to be one of the crowd who is not clear on the concept and ends up wandering around and dithering a little. We also had a chance to see several great blue herons, always individually. One was flying by with a stick in his beak, and a couple of them were standing at the water’s edge with the wind blowing their beards. One tonight was perched on the top of a sign down at the beach, looking from the back, Susan said, like an undertaker. Apparently Stanley Park has one of the largest urban colonies in the world; in 2004, eighty of them showed up and started nesting here.

Harbour seal
We walked the sea wall several times with our friends, and saw in the distance some swimming animals, but we never got close enough to decide whether they were otters or seals. Tonight one of them swam close enough to the wall where we were standing that we could have dived down and touched her, and she was clearly a seal. She was larger than the ones I saw in Cape Town, and spotted rather than the uniform colour I saw there. She was floating gently on the surface and took a good long time, even swimming closer at one point while looking right at us. It was clear though that she could swim like the dickens, and when she was underwater you could see her white belly as she swooped around catching minnows.

That’s a Triathlete
One of the other harbour sightings I made tonight was of an ungainly looking creature flopping about a little. I wondered if it was something injured. It turned out, of course, to be a human swimmer. The triathletes are in town, having arrived from all over the world, wearing their spiderman costumes in all weather and making the rest of us look just that little bit more tired and fat. We saw a sign in the lobby today mentioning that the kitchen was going to open early for them, since they want to breakfast between 4 and 5 a.m. rather than at the more conventional 7:00. God love them.