hiidenkonttibeta

日本語の course continues. Everything we learned last year is not perfectly clear, and we’re learning new grammar already. Next month we’ll have a test on these 150 漢字:

It may look like much for one test, but compared to the list of じょうようかんじ (basic set of 1945 kanji in common use in Japan) it’s just a beginning. Here’s our set highlighted among them:

Birds in a tree, playing vultures
Leaves in a tree, whispering of winter
Birds on the ground, wandering aimlessly
Leaves on the ground, playing … dead

The tree leaves have a bit different colour at night under the street lights. They’re even greener than usually, or a bit different shade of green. The reason is probably that the street lights use mercury lamps which emit greenish light.

Then there’s the basic “red window in a dark building” photo and some over-exposed lights of shop signs and windows on Hallituskatu:

And finally, me posing with the statues at the railway station. Well, the mirror makes it a little bit abstract:

Alko added recently an interesting whisky to their selection of single malts: Ardbeg 10y.o.

Ardbeg is surprisingly light in colour, almost like cider – but the taste is quite different. It’s an Islay whisky, and it’s as peaty and smoky as expected from uisge beatha from that island. Recommended, if you enjoy Laphroaig.

Most of the streets in the center of Oulu are made of stone (red granite, I would guess) instead of asphalt. Even the zebra crossings are made of blackish and whitish stones. This is how they look:

The stones are cubes with about 10cm long sides. The streets seem to be basically constructed of a gravel base, an asphalt layer on top of that, then sand, and finally the stones on the top. Here’s a street which is under construction:

The streets look nicer than asphalt, but building them looks quite laborious. Usually about six workers go on all fours side by side in wet sand all day, hammering the stone cubes in place. The stones aren’t even in straight rows, they make archs, so they’ve got to have quite a good plan for putting the street together correctly.

Today was “International Car Free Day”. Oulu is one of the participating cities and there’s been ads in buses and around the city. Our friendly bus company Koskilinjat seemed the handle this opportunity for attracting more passengers in their usual smooth manner. Oops, I seem to have the sarcasm mode on – just a moment, switching to plain whine mode for a little while.

They sucked.

According to the time table it takes 15 minutes to get from the city center to the University using bus route 19. Today it was over double that, which means about 40 minutes from the center to Technopolis. The bus #19 is usually full in the morning and there’s people standing on the aisle, like today:

Compared to Japan this is probably half empty, but we Finns find it crowded enough. Today it was so full that on every stop from the center to the University the driver had to tell the people waiting on the bus stop that there’s no room for them.

What a wonderful pro- public transport experience for all the people who actually made the mistake of not using their cars today! You’re waiting on a bus stop, in the rain (it was raining), the bus is 10 minutes late already and when it finally arrives the driver just says “sorry, we’re full, there’ll be another bus in 20 minutes” and drives away. Will you:
a) sell your car and use bus from now on
or
b) never again voluntarily use bus?