Oulu

Our train tickets were for a sleeper car on the night train to Oulu. We would be on it until 7:30 the next morning. The berth was absurdly tiny with three beds stacked on top of each other in a triple bunk bed arrangement and a minuscule bright orange sink with a mirrored medicine cabinet above it stuffed inside the small room. I love sleeping on trains and was happy to wake up early so that I had some time to lie in the bottom bunk and feel the train wheels roll beneath the floor.

As the time got nearer to 7:30 we started packing up. This wasn’t very easy to do with three people in such a small space and one or more of us got sent out into the hall from time to time. In the end we managed to get everything back in our bags except for a toothbrush – the one thing lost on the trip.

Oulu didn’t have an Omena Hotel so we went with Hotelli Turisti partly because of its location – right across the street from the train station – and partly because of its name.  The Hotelli Turisti was no accommodation paradise. The room was spare and the bathroom had one of those European showers where there is no curtain, just a drain in the middle of the floor. Still I found myself to be rather absurdly fond of the place.  There was a TV on which we watched several American TV shows with Finnish subtitles, wireless for the laptop, 3 comfortable beds with odd yellow and olive green patterned bedspreads, blue and white walls, and a small refrigerator which came in handy.   The average sized hotel room seemed very spacious after the tiny night train sleeping arrangement.

Oulu was the smallest city we would see on our trip and it seemed quite a bit smaller than its real size (pop. 140,000) because it was the most decentralized of all the cities we visited making much of its population base farther out than we could comfortably get to by walking. The guidebook listed it as ‘the tar capitol of Finland’ but we were there because Paul was scheduled to meet with two researchers from the University of Oulu as well as give a talk to their Geography department. But the talk and meetings were for day two leaving day one of our stay in Oulu pleasantly unstructured. We puttered around organizing the room for a bit then went out in search of breakfast.  The Katri Antell bakery smelled good when we popped our heads in the doorway.  We had coffee and karjalanpiirakka (Finnish breakfast pasties) and I was foolhardy enough to order another reindeer pasty with better results than what I got in Helsinki.  After breakfast we chilled out for awhile. We were nearing mid-trip and wanted to decompress more than we wanted to explore. There was a grocery store between the bakery and the hotel so we stopped in and bought a lunch and dinner’s worth of provisions. When we got back to the hotel Kaitlin and I put away the groceries and turned on the TV while Paul went back out and in search of a place to do laundry. He found one or rather a place where they do your laundry for you and you can pick it up the next day – I don’t quite get the Nordic aversion to coin-fed laundromats. This was as expensive a proposition as doing our laundry in the Lofotens was but by this time we had become somewhat numbed to the shocking prices of ordinary things and just paid it. Later in the early afternoon Paul and I went out once more to do some mild exploring but Kaitlin opted to stay behind and chill all day with bad TV and games of solitaire.

Our explorations yielded a rather sorrowful bit of poorly drained swampland that was supposed to be quite a nice park in the summertime with a closed cafe that was supposed to be a hip gathering place for students, again in the summertime, and an expressway. We noted that the town reminded of us College Station. The sun was getting ready to set around 3:30 this far north and a rather chill air was coming off of the gray Gulf of Bothnia. Finally we found a way to escape the park-swamp-expressway place we were in by finding a long bridge that took us to a nearby island that turned out to be rather nice. The island had the oldest buildings in the area because the town had been burned to the ground by the British in the Crimean War and people started rebuilding on the island first. That dated the island buildings to roughly 150 years old but they seemed much older because of the style they were built in so it was a little disconcerting when we stopped in a pub and had a beer in a building that looked like a larger replica of the log cabin I grew up in while the building itself was 150 years younger than my childhood home. Good beer in a nice log cabin though and Paul and I had fun talking over what we had seen on our trip so far. We walked around the rest of the island after our pub stop talking pictures of the enormous paper mill across the bay and marveling at how early it was getting dark. We returned to the hotel room around 4:00 to find a relaxed Kaitlin, her solitaire cards spread out over the floor and an Finnish ballroom dancing competition on the TV.

For dinner we finally put the dress clothes we had been dragging around with us to good use by getting fancied up to go to an upscale Russian restaurant the guidebook recommended. The Zakuska was delightfully Russian with a color scheme of bright grass green, red, gold, dusty-olive gold, dusty-olive green, and pale sky blue. There were painted wooden stackable dolls and fans on the shelves and the table was overflowing with wine goblets and lots of silverware at each place setting. Kaitlin with her bright green dress,  gold hair, and blue eyes blended in perfectly. This was sort of her treat – a small concession to our saying no to extending the trip to visiting St. Petersburg. We got three meals and passed them around. Conversation was about Russian history which rather inevitably lead to a discussion about human responses to human suffering. Dessert was an amazing rum ice cream and crepe creation that we thought we didn’t have room for but it disappeared pretty quickly and brought our talk back around to the glories of Russian art.

The next day was mid-term election day in the US bringing an end to one of the dumbest campaign seasons I’ve ever seen. US politics does not get sweeter from watching it online in Scandinavia. We’d voted via overseas ballot back in Bergen and pointedly ignored finding out the results until later. Paul got dressed in a suit and tie and left for the University of Oulu fairly early in the morning leaving Kaitlin and I on our own with plans to see if the green splotch on the free map of Oulu we picked up in the hotel lobby was marked the cemetery. It did and while the Oulu cemetery wasn’t as colossally awesome as the one in Helsinki it was made in the same style and we passed a few pleasant hours wandering around until lunchtime when we returned to the restaurant in the basement of the hotel to see if their Finnish-style buffet was as heavy on the cream and butter as the one on the ferry was. After lunch we went back upstairs where we watched what was available on the TV – an episode of Little House on the Prairie followed by an enthusiastic if poorly made travel show featuring New Zealand. In the afternoon I took Kaitlin to the island Paul and I had found the day before. We hung out on the woods side of the island for while enjoying the murky moody Bothnian Sea-ness of it all. Then, when the sun began its early setting, we headed back to the hotel with plans of an evening of dinner made out of our groceries and more bad TV while Paul was wined and dined by the University of Oulu faculty.

This was exactly what we wanted to do so we were a bit disappointed when Paul came back about 5 minutes after we returned to the hotel room announcing that we would all be going out with one of the researchers he’d met with that day. Kaitlin was able to beg off but I didn’t really see how I could in case his wife would also be dragged out of the house to meet with me. In the end I was glad to have gone through getting dressed up and going out again although as it turned out his wife didn’t show leaving me to be a bit of a third wheel. But the food was good and it was interesting to hear what a Finnish professor thought about Finland and its relationships with its neighbors. It was a long dinner and when Paul and I came back to the hotel room we were happy to turn in early before another day of travel began.