hiidenkonttibeta

So, this year we have the more traditionally Finnish i.e. cold version of the Spring. I called my mum on mother’s day and she remembered that this time on last year they were planting new strawberry plants in sunshine, now there’s snow on the field.

In Oulu we’ve had only a few degrees C for the last two or three weeks, along with quite a lot of cold wind. Today it was also raining quite seriously. They brought the ice cream kiosks on the streets when the snow had melt:

Not a lot of queue, since it’s closed, and has been so except on a few days.

update: it started snowing later in the evening.

Spotted this building with a rather advanced level ladder going to the roof:

It’s actually tilting outwards for the last meter or so. Not for casual climbers.

There’s an old walkway / bicycle path over the railways in Oulu. The lost interest in maintaining it when they built the nearby Joutsensilta bridge, and closed the path at both ends with a heavy duty bar and a sign. But people didn’t feel like walking the extra 100 meters to the new bridge:

They can try to make things awkward, but it’s no use. Somebody actually came and sawed off a meter of the railings. In both ends. And by the tracks it seems that it is in active, frequent use.

On yesterday a huge new Club Teatria had it’s opening with Teräsbetoni, Tarot and Twisted Sister playing – apparently they wanted to make it quite clear that the place is not primarily for Katri Helena or Antti Tuisku but for noisy, sweaty rock’n'roll.

First one on the stage was Teräsbetoni, a wonderful Finnish equivalent of Manowar. They have a similar attitude but they don’t have similar muscles; perhaps they do more playing than pumping iron:

“Teräsbetoni kiittää mutta EI KUMARRA!”

A bit more serious metal band Tarot played next. They’ve existed since early 80′s, but somehow I’ve never been too interested in them. Heard some catchy tunes, so maybe I should listen to a few of their albums.

“Jos DJ lopettaisi sen humpan soittamisen, me oltais valmiita aloittamaan” (tai sinnepäin, sillä hetkellä DJ soitteli jotain Puppetsin aikaista Metallicaa..)

And at last we got to the main act, Twisted Sister. Last time they’ve been to Finland was 19 years ago. As a teenager I listened to them every now and then. I was more into Metallica, Dio, WASP and some others, but I got big enough dose of Stay Hungry and Come Out and Play for hearing their songs live to be a positive experience.

Club Teatria is a good place for seeing gigs, but they really should improve their input/output system a lot, for both the building and beer. Checking the coats when coming in and going out was very slow, there were far too few toilets, and getting a beer took incredibly long.

We went to see horse races. I’ve wanted to try photographing horse races for a while now (with a real camera, obviously), so at last I was able to take a try on that. My girlfriend had never been to horse races, so I managed to get her come along to get an experience point.

In the photo they’re just warming up, the actual runs had more horses on the track. My parent’s horse’s offspring should have been running there, but sadly he was missing. I shot 140 photos or so, quite a lot of them unusable for anything else but for studying what went wrong in my technique.