hiidenkonttibeta

It’s been some months since I last had a chance to play nature photographer. In addition to taking a lot of photos of misty fields I also wandered around in the forests and took photos of mushrooms gone bad, for example:

I’m very happy with the performance of my Manfrotto 055B Pro tripod. It’s so flexible, there’s almost always some way to arrange it even in tricky places where my old 190 would have thrown it’s legs up in desperation. It’s a bit heavy to lug around, though..

Here’s a tiny bit of fall foliage:

Wait, what’s the gray thing under that spruce tree? Let’s take a close look:

Shoes. How come someone has left his shoes here, neatly arranged under a tree? It’s only few hundred meters to the nearest road but it’s pretty hard environment for walking barefooted.

In addition to shoes people have some left other curious stuff in the forest:

A stove. Why did someone dump his old stove here in the forest of all places?

There was a nice amount of mist in Tervola, too. I walked around for a few hours trying to take some misty photographs with a real camera – and some snapshots with camera phone, too. First we have a tree by the riverside:

And then a series of misty fields:

In both photo pairs it’s a view to one direction and to the opposite direction.

まんぴつ proudly presents another Terribly Exciting document: what does it look like inside pikajuna?

First we take a look at the seats. They’re bluish with some simple decorative patterns, and they’re quite soft, much softer than the seats on modern InterCity and Pendolino trains. The plastic parts are brown. This is how they look like:

On the back of the seats there’s a storage slot for a tray which can be attached to the slots in the hand rests (the slots can be seen in the first photo). The seats also have a detachable pillow, a foot rest, and straps to hold magazines or such:

Over the seats there’s a shelf for storing luggage. The shelf, as well as the hooks for hanging clothes, are made of thick aluminium. The shelf and the arrangement of the seats (the rows on the left and right side face different directions) can be seen in the following picture:

The train cars have toilets, too. The mechanism of the old models used in the pikajuna trains is so simple that it has generated a saying “toimii kuin junan vessa” (“works like train toilet”). To empty the toilet you step on a pedal which opens a hatch and drops all the output you may have generated down on the rail. This sounds like something we Finns may have copied from our innovative Eastern neighbours.

Train cars also have doors. Previously they were also very simple, with sturdy metallic handle to open the lock and that’s it. Nowadays they have some kind of electrically controlled system which disallows opening of the door when the train is moving. There’s a green lamp which lights up when the door can be opened using the modern red plastic handle.

My route to the bus stop in the morning often goes past a hobby store called Sinooperi. They sell colourful paper & pens and other stuff for making decorations, unpainted porcelain plates & paint and things like that. Their shop looks like this:

So they sell all kinds of stuff which does not interest (young) male population the least bit.

Or so one could think, until now. Suddenly, a shelf full of Warhammer figures and rulebooks and stuff has appeared in the middle of their store:

And it makes at least a bit of sense. To play good games of Warhammer some kind of area must be built for the game. It can be a piece of landscape where the armies meet among the hills and forests, or maybe there’s some buildings to defend and attack. And they have a lot of material for building the sceneries available.

Their usual angel-building porcelain-painting customers probably aren’t too interested in Elven Archers or about a book describing the races of Chaos. But I might be wrong – maybe there’s soon a lot of ladies in Warhammer game sessions with their armies of Orcs dressed in pink frill.

Today was a foggy day, and quite cold as well. The fog stayed long past midday, and it seemed to be everywhere. Of course it didn’t turn up quite so well in the snapshots I took:

The second photo is from the “old” Teknologiakylä. Most of the buildings there are low and long and made of red bricks. I worked there for a few years (while studying), but our building wasn’t like these, it was a complex two-story labyrinth which felt like it had evolved instead of built with a plan.

The reason why I wandered around there was that I missed my bus again after the 日本語の lesson and walked from Linnanmaa to Technopolis. The third and fourth photos are from Technopolis, the former is a view towards North by Smarthouse and the latter is view South. There’s at least some きり in each photo.