/travel/finland/Wrapping Things Up
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
Argh. When I got my Visa card, they told me I needed to wait 6 months before I could get the credit limit upped from its current piddly 500CAD. I'm sure they mentioned it, but apparently it has to be "active" for 6 months. Now, I don't need my credit card every month. And if you let it sit for a month, your time gets reset. To add to the frustration, you can allegedly call collect to one of the Visa numbers. I don't know how to call collect from Finland, so I tried to use Canada Direct. It asked me for my long distance provider in Canada, which I don't have. So I pressed 0, and got a very curmudgeony woman who very quickly got frustrated and assumed I was stupid. It turns out you just have to pick Bell Canada, and then select a collect call. But then the Visa robot and the Collect Call robot just yell at each other. In other news, I got my biked tuned up at Pyýÿrýÿ Sauvola. Nothing quite so pleasant as a freshly tuned up bike. Got new racks, new treads, a toolkit, and some other miscellanies. They were friendly, helpful, and gave me a fairly decent "discount" without discussion. That seems to be the way in Finland, when you buy a bunch of stuff. They did a good job. I also closed my bank account today, and sent some money home to be spent on my upcoming cycling. It cost 16EUR to transfer the money in one week, and was otherwise quite painless. Nordea Pankki did much better than HSBC last year. Shipping my skis home would cost about 300EUR with Fedex. Can't ship them with the Posti since they're too long. Not sure what I'm going to do with them yet -- one option is to ask one of the Canadians here very nicely to courier them. I saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday. It was grand, largely because I haven't seen a movie in cinemas for a long time. It was only 5EUR; apparently Thursday is Cheap Night. I'm reading The Da Vinci Code. It's not so much good as it is addictive. There are still many errands to be run. I need to pack and ship some stuff, buy fuel for my campstove, etc. And I want to finish my project here, so I leave them with something useful.
New Albums from the Gallery
/travel/finland/Nine Months of Loose Ends, and Midnight Sun
Tonight was my last night in Oulu. It's nearly 6am, and I'm still up, taking care of various things. Nine months lets you build up a lot of loose ends.
Tomorrow I'm leaving with Peter, a German who drove here. He's taking me into Sweden, where I'll start my bike trip. He had some people over, so I went to have something of a goodbye party. At 12:11, there was that characteristics sound when everybody knows that something interesting is going on, but nobody knows what. Eventually I clued in -- the window by the kitchen was casting shadows. The sun was still up. Oulu's been cloudy lately, so this was the first time I'd seen the Midnight Sun.
My work has wrapped up, but unfortunately my project hasn't. I hope it goes well after I leave.
Today (well, yesterday) I shipped one of my suitcases home, and then I'll send the other one home in a few hours. It's costing more than I expected, somewhere around 160EUR = 250CAD. Ouch.
From here, I'm going cycling. I'll start in Sweden, meet up with Steve in Copenhagen, and then we make our way to Paris. I'm still not sure who I'm visiting along the way, but I've made a couple of connections.
The whole departure from Oulu has been very subdued. Most of the people I was closest with are long gone. The last couple weeks have been spent focused on wrapping things up, particularly at work. "With not a bang, but a whisper," or something like that.
Times like these always give me a sense of sadness; it's hard for me to see the details of the good things in my future, and it's easy for me to see all the things I didn't do while I was here. The consequences of my course failure were very unfortunate, and meant that I didn't get as much out of my time in Europe as I might have. I'm sure I'll find upsides later on, but for now it seems like a pretty big consequence. Could have been worse, though.
I'm looking forward to get back to Canada. I'm not overly eager to leave, but I'm ready to leave. Everything seems to be in a fairly good balance, under the circumstances. I've had my time here, learned, grew, met more people from more cultures than I ever have, and on many occasions thoroughly enjoyed myself in ways or situations that I wouldn't in Canada, where I can be more picky about things.
So, that's where I'm at. Moving on. I'll try to post things as I cycle, but I make no guarantees. Of course, they won't be in the /travel/finland category, but the /travel/cycling category.
I've also been very bad with emailing lately. I'm sorry about that, but it had to take a backburner while I tried to get my project done. I look forward very much to seeing all the people that I haven't seen in a long time, and hope my lack of emails and phonecalls hasn't pissed anyone off too much. :-)
And so ends the last (?) entry from Finland.
/travel/finland/Wrapping Things Up
Argh. When I got my Visa card, they told me I needed to wait 6 months before I could get the credit limit upped from its current piddly 500CAD. I'm sure they mentioned it, but apparently it has to be "active" for 6 months. Now, I don't need my credit card every month. And if you let it sit for a month, your time gets reset.
To add to the frustration, you can allegedly call collect to one of the Visa numbers. I don't know how to call collect from Finland, so I tried to use Canada Direct. It asked me for my long distance provider in Canada, which I don't have. So I pressed 0, and got a very curmudgeony woman who very quickly got frustrated and assumed I was stupid. It turns out you just have to pick Bell Canada, and then select a collect call. But then the Visa robot and the Collect Call robot just yell at each other.
In other news, I got my biked tuned up at Pyörä Sauvola. Nothing quite so pleasant as a freshly tuned up bike. Got new racks, new treads, a toolkit, and some other miscellanies. They were friendly, helpful, and gave me a fairly decent "discount" without discussion. That seems to be the way in Finland, when you buy a bunch of stuff. They did a good job. I also closed my bank account today, and sent some money home to be spent on my upcoming cycling. It cost 16EUR to transfer the money in one week, and was otherwise quite painless. Nordea Pankki did much better than HSBC last year.
Shipping my skis home would cost about 300EUR with Fedex. Can't ship them with the Posti since they're too long. Not sure what I'm going to do with them yet -- one option is to ask one of the Canadians here very nicely to courier them.
I saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday. It was grand, largely because I haven't seen a movie in cinemas for a long time. It was only 5EUR; apparently Thursday is Cheap Night.
I'm reading The Da Vinci Code. It's not so much good as it is addictive.
There are still many errands to be run. I need to pack and ship some stuff, buy fuel for my campstove, etc. And I want to finish my project here, so I leave them with something useful.
/travel/finland/Sudden Craving
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
My kingdom for a Subway"! Sandwich!*
*Offer not valid on days ending in y.
/travel/finland/Profound Thoughts from a Weekend in Kuusamo
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
Last weekend I went to Kuusamo. Coincidentally, so did Paul, but we didn't bump into each other.
I left in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The town was quiet, and I got a few shots of empty Oulu. On the bus out of town, there was a little garden of tulips, nearing full bloom. The busride was uneventful and sleepy.
Kuusamo is a reasonably large town. Nearby is Ruka, a major skiing center in Finland. We were outside a town outside of Ruka, in a rented cabin. The cabin itself was simple, and its surroundings were fairly bland.
The highlight was two light hikes through the Finnish forest. It doesn't take too long to get deep enough in the hills ("mountains", they say) that you can't hear anything that doesn't belong. I wish I had taken more time to just stop and listen, since somtimes the sounds of cities drives me to distraction. We all stopped on one of the little walkways at one point. You could hear exactly three things, and nothing more -- running water from nearby rapids, a few birds chirping, and our own little rustles as we stood in silence.
The Finnish forest is an interesting place. Because of the climate and lighting, the trees are generally narrow and spindly. The evergreens have long bare trunks and fairly sparse needles, and the leaves on the deciduous trees are small, but plentiful.
The trails we were on took us over bogs, up and down hills, and through flat fields with trees. We saw only a few signs of fauna, though these included the largest ant hill I've ever seen. The trail was often rocky, but the forest around us wasn't. It's obvious when you say it that way that the forest is rocky too, but it's not obvious when you're walking along. The rocks are lying under the forest, almost never visible.
The bogs are fascinating. They seemed stagnant, but if you looked carefully you could see clearly that the water was in fact flowing through them, reasonably quickly. There are only a few inches of water above the soft, moss-like growth that runs deep beneath them. All of the lakes and ponds tucked in the mountains were clear and lifeless. The usual sets of circles rippling outward from fish or frogs were absent, as were the little trails from an insect's wake. We saw one water bug the whole time. There's little algae and few lily pads. Things seem to decay slowly -- some ponds had an unnatural number of trees at the bottom.
When I was walking, I was trying to figure out how I would explain the beauty of those forests. They aren't more untouched than National Parks in Canada, and by most characteristics they aren't the beautiful. But they are. And then I figured it out: The whole forest puts the cycles of death and life and the perpetuity of those cycles directly, unavoidably in front of you. The forest felt ageless, markless, unsusceptible to forest fires or other traumas; Finland is relatively immune to severe weather and natural disasters like earthquakes. One thousand years ago, and one thousand years from now, these forest are the same. You could see trees in every state of life, from pinecone to sappling to fullgrown to fresh-fallen to covered in moss to being just a long narrow imperfection in the ground, completely buried in other life, more often than not with sapplings growing on it. Trees that had fallen still clinging to the earth around their shallow root structure seemed to make good starting points for ant-hills. Other than the trodden path that we walked along, everything was soft and moist, layer upon layer of life, death, death, and decay.
The forest was constantly in all states of life and death. It was impossible to separate the obvious cycle in any reasonable way if you looked at the forest instead of the trees.
/travel/finland/Ethics Essays Posted
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I wrote four essays for my practical ethics course.
Here they are:
1. SingerAndVeganism - "Extending Peter Singer's arguments towards Veganism, or letting it all fall down"
2. SingerAndTheEnvironment - "An emotional argument"
3. SingerAndAbortion - "An emotional argument[sic]" (Errr..that's a mistake -- I forgot to change the subtitle.)
4. PeterSingerOnWorldPoverty
Enjoy.
/travel/finland/Best. Mark. Ever.
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
What a strange term; it included my first course failure and my highest mark ever. I got 95% on my Computer Graphics course, topping out my 92% in CHEM120 in my very first school term.
Obviously I'm delighted, but it certainly leaves me a bit confused in trying to evaluate the Finnish academic system in terms of difficulty.
On the subject of academics, I also finished my four essays for my Practical Ethics course. I'll post them soon, but I just noticed that my Wiki is severely broken, moreso than usual. I'm fairly happy with them, except that I think in arguing against Peter Singer I look like a fascist abortionist anti-environmentalist libertarian Capitalist...which I'm not. He's the picture of impractical left-wing ivory tower ethics in my ever so humble opinion.
/travel/finland/The things you forget..
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
Yesterday was a fun day. After humming and hawing about what to do, Clare and I went for a walk in the light rain. It's about a 15 minute walk to the End Of Civilization, at which point you get dumped into a forest. We walked through the forest, which was wet from a few days of rain. The moss and earth was wonderfully soft underfoot, and we walked along the edge of the lake for a while. That's quintessential Oulu for me, and I'm going to miss it when I'm gone.
In any case, the rain (predictably) got heavier. We hung out under some of the rather spindly evergreens trying to take shelter during the worst bits, but it didn't make all that difference. Eventually we just made a break for it, and on our way home we picked up the necessaries for some lasagne.
Dana's back in town, and her family's here too. She suggested that we cook the lasagne at their place. So we went there, but discovered that the little cottage they had rented had everything but an oven. Pizza became the order of the day. I tried some pizza with blue cheese. It was okay, but not great. I think I could grow to like it.
Then we went to Panimo with her family, and eventually left for Amarillo. Last night was the last weekend for a lot of people, so there were lots of people there, including a large contingent of French, and I generally enjoy socializing with them. It was a really good time.
On the walk home, I realized something fascinating, which gives the title of this entry. I don't remember what the world looks like when it's dark. I tried to picture it, and I couldn't. I know it's not pitch black, and I know it's not bright light, but I don't really remember how dark it is. This sounds weird or invent, but it's completely true.
I should back up a bit, though. It doesn't get dark here anymore, not at all. We've lost another kind of darkness. There is no longer civil twilight, and the weather site now reports 24 hours of "officially" visible light. I'll be posting pictures of my curtains system soon enough -- suffice to say that there are three layers.
It still gets dim, though. And on a really cloudy night, it sorta seems like dark; that's what made me realize that I can't really picture a normal "dark night."
I'm still sleeping fine, but it's a bit hard to know how to schedule yourself. Definitely an interesting thing to experience. I'm getting a ride to Oslo/Copenhagen/Malmo with a German who drove here. We may or may not cross the artic circle, which is the point where the sun itself is visible all the time on the longest day.
/travel/finland/Second exam went...very well! Redux.
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Well, it appears that whatever took my site down also ate about a days worth of changes, comments, and other miscellaneous stuff. That's pretty annoying.
In any case, I'm 99% sure I blogged about how I actually did very well on my graphics exam. It sounds like the sort of egotistical thing that I would blog about. I got the highest mark amongst the 8 or 10 students who wrote at this sitting, and by quite a wide margin. I'm very pleased. Now, I just have to get off me bum and write those darn essays for Practical Ethics. Time is of the essence.
Anyway, sorry for the crashage, my faithful readers. Maybe I'll keep a mirror so that you needn't be disappointed if things go down again.
It's kinda like a glitch in the matrix -- something like 12 hours of my electronic space were just sorta rewounded. I don't know if comments were posted, and I can't remember what I wrote. The internet is so ephemeral. That's why we love it.
/travel/finland/Second exam went...extremely well!
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
Yay! I got 85% on my graphics exam. It was pretty lucky, though -- what I studied was what the exam was on, and what I didn't study was not on the exam. He said that I got the highest mark of the (about 8) people that wrote the exam at that sitting by a fair margin. Most of the other students will probably write at the next sitting. There were perhaps 25 students in the lectures.
Now, if only they'd let me rewrite that other one...
