Suomi Diaries: A trip to Nuuksio

One of the really cool things about the supermarket in Otaniemi is that it opens at 7 in the morning and closes at 11 in the night.

For comparison, the Tech market in Kharagpur would open for 6 hours in a day and remain closed on all (inter)-national/state holidays and Mondays.

The other really cool thing about the Aalto campus is the cafeteria system for lunch – the staff have the same food as the students. Only thing - it is subsidised for the students. Browse through their menus and go to any cafeteria you wish.

Today was one of those rare days when both the cafeteria as well as the supermarket was closed! And you couldn’t turn to the latest Otaniemi Sensation because it wasn’t a Sunday. A trip to Nuuksio National Park was inevitable (unless I wanted to sit in my room twiddling my thumbs). Not really sure of what to expect, I jumped the bandwagon. It wasn’t very difficult reaching the place thanks to amazingly detailed descriptions of routes on the Journey Planner.

And then you could find amazingly detailed terrain maps in the Tourist Information Centres to navigate the area with information about location of camp sites, lakes and even about details such as the kind of trees (conifer/non-conifer) to be found at a particular place.

After a bit of a dilemma*, some crazy ringing sounds in the woods (read lost mobile phones), we finally found a spot that overlooked a lake.

Someone commented that the small piece of land in the lake looked like the famous painting of Michelangelo: The Creation of Adam. Come to think of it, even the colours seem to somewhat match!

One could find people going fishing, hiking, biking, swimming and picking blueberries. (It was too cold for swimming and it is a while for the blueberry season).

We picked up some interesting lines of conversation which I will not describe in detail here. Compressing a 4D event into 2D photographs does cause some amount of data loss. Maybe some of them could be the subject of a blog post!

Hei Hei!!

* We couldn’t really resolve*** our starting points and destinations owing to low signal quality on the mobile phone and an interesting fact** I learnt about how the sun moves near the poles.

**East to West via North/South depending on the season (summer/winter). The peak elevation remains about 60 degrees and not 90 degrees like near the equator. To compound matters, it was around noon: but the sun wasn’t exactly on top of our heads because the noon doesn’t always divide the day into exactly two halves. It depends on the rising and setting time of the sun!

*** See photo above.