hiidenkonttibeta

There’s 183 lo-fi photos from 2002-2003 in the まんぴつ snapshot archives without any comments. Most of them aren’t interesting enough to worry about descriptions, but I find some of them worth remembering, so I’ll make some time travelling and make blog entries titled “Time Travel” with them. I won’t backdate the entries, however.

The first one takes us to second week of July, 2002, and the place is Karhunkierros hiking route in Kuusamo.

There were three of us: me, Mika, and Mika’s friend from Switzerland. We drove to Kuusamo on Wednesday evening (my summer holiday started that day), and walked a few kilometers to our first camping site.

We started the next day with a brisk vertical climb, which might have been a shortcut, but was probably quite a lot harder than walking the long way. After a few kilometers in a forest we came to a river again.

In the evening we descended to sandy beaches of Oulankajoki and pitched our tent there. It was also time to do some experimental cooking – making pancakes with Trangia…

We started the third day with a brisk & long ascension. Descending from the path down to riverside didn’t feel so smart after that one. We did some more walking by the river, and spotted reindeer and some local art.

We walked only a little way of Karhunkierros, and returned to Oulu on the evening of the third day.

New Björk album Medúlla was released yesterday.

Björk is one of the artists whose albums I go and buy when they come out (there aren’t many whom I trust that much – CMX and Therion come to mind and Opeth has a chance to reach that stage..).

I got it today. It’s a strange album, starting with the leaflet and the track list on the back cover, which are printed in black on black (actually very dark gray, but a lot of light is required to notice it).

It doesn’t contain much musical instruments, and what there is is pretty simple. It’s made of human voices. The Icelandic Choir and Tagaq (inuit throat-singer) appear most often – and there’s two songs with only Björk as a performer.

It might take some listening to fully appreciate this one :-)

Some years ago we laughed at Kittilä and Sodankylä who seemed to be competing each other in the amount of useless roundabouts they can manage to fit in a small town. But at least they did proper roundabouts, with exits to some roads. But the reasons for existence of this one in Seinäjoki might be a little bit far-fetched:

Well, if it’s got a traffic sign for a roundabout, that’s what it is.

Another surprise was to find out that they don’t practise only pohojammaalaista puukkojunkkariutta there, but also wushu:

Why visit Seinäjoki? Well, by train it’s in midway between Helsinki and Oulu…

I’ve wanted to try good absinthe for a long time now. The only absinthe Finnish Alko sells has been reviewed as “almost suitable for cleaning windows”, so that didn’t quite meet the requirements. Luckily there are shops in Europe which shell the good stuff by mail. I got two bottles, Mari Mayans and Deva Absenta:

Both of them have a lot of alcohol (70%). I also got the absinthe spoon to do “the ritual” properly. I’ve used the original one in which water is added to the absinthe dropping it slowly through a sugar cube, instead of the modern version with pyrotechnics. As the following photos show, the liquid turns white when enough water is added:

A real absinthe is a nice, strong drink, but I feel like drinking it only occasionally. Single malt whisky is a lot more pleasant drink.

Suomen Malmi (if I remember the name correctly) has been drilling around Rotuaari for two weeks or so. My guess is that they’re making analysis for the underground parking hall project.

They have this big drill, a machine with caterpillar tracks to move it around. They make a funny sound on the granite streets, but the process of moving it around looked even funnier. It was as if the guy moving it was taking the machine for a walk, holding it by hand. Too bad he turned around at the exact moment I took the photo; most of the time he was leading the way, so they’re walking right. The camera in 7610 is so slow that I missed the chance to take a better shot: