I have a faint recollection that I promised posts sooner than a month after my last post, but hey, January has been an awful month to deal with – everything’s been delayed in my life. But enough of that, on to the post (and the images!).
Continue readingCategory Archives: Travel
December With the New 750D
There were a few things in December 2018 that I wanted to do. First of all, I wanted to test out my then recently purchased EOS 750D. Second was that I wanted to see The Phantom of the Opera at the national opera house in Helsinki with my girlfriend. So I decided to do both.
Continue readingThe Fellow of Joensuu: Two Octobers
Well now. It’s been ages since I last made a post that focused on pictures. I think it’s time to bring this “brief” pause to an end today!
It really has bothered me over the years that I’ve had some of these pictures from 2015 just sitting around, so I decided to put them together with the recent pictures I took in Joensuu. There are still more Autumn and Summer pictures that I’ve got lying around (some from Sweden as well), but they will get to have their moment at some point. Today we focus on pictures from Joensuu from the Octobers of 2015 and 2018.
An Entrance Exam, Half a Year in the Making
So. I’ve not posted an update on the site in a long, long while. As one might guess from the title of this post, my excuse is that I had been, until recently, preparing for an entrance exam for nearly half a year – that, and the fact that I am a lazy sod. Whatever you think of my excuses, I care not for I am here to give you, the reader, an account of my recent adventure to the city of Joensuu. But first, I’ll say a few (paragraphs of) things about my studies.
Christmascaching in Finland (24.12.14)
You know how Christmas is the time of year that you’re meant to spend time with the family and just stay home? Yeah well, I spent a couple of hours geocaching before lunch. The lighting was great (the sun was actually visible for once), and the snow seemed like it was going to be gone soon enough, so I had to go get some pictures as well.
Having never parked around the area, I spent a good ten minutes thinking of how I should be parking my car when I got there. With the initial difficulties out of the way, I decided to wander in to the forest in hopes of getting a few good pictures before starting to hunt for the geocaches in the area.
Taking a shortcut through a swampy, snowy forest
For once, there was snow around Christmas, after it, and it would seem that it will last all the way until after New Year’s before it starts melting again. Since it’s so rare to have so much snow around this time of year nowadays, I thought I should go out to take some pictures of the woods and the lake nearby. I picked up my stuff, got appropriately clothed and started walking.
First, before wandering to the skiing paths in the forest, I decided to go towards the town. Why? Because the trees around the road were bent by the snow; it looked pretty damn cool. After I was done, I started heading back towards the forest.
A Tragedy Struck Tyrrelstown – How it affected me
Earlier this morning, in the small park area behind Tyrrelstown, a small boy of the age of five drowned.
The pond that I so adore has claimed a life of a little boy, and it would seem that there are talks of increasing security due to the frequency of these events; another drowning happened recently at another manmade pond in the north western area of Dublin.
I heard of this tragedy as I had finished my morn… noon jog, at around 13:30; I met a journalist who asked if I had heard of a drowning earlier in the morning. I expressed my surprise to this event, and after having said that I had no idea, he moved on to someone else. So I went on to continue my post-run walk until I reached the pond itself.
Tyrrelstown – Hive of Scum and Villany?
Tyrrelstown. From what I’ve understood, the name of this town seems to be connected to crime and poor living conditions. I presume that those people have never lived there, and if they have, they are doing ridiculous exaggerations for some unknown reason. Whatever the case, I’ll argue some points in this rant. After the rant, there’ll be pictures, so if you’re not interested in this, just skip ahead and look at the pretty pictures.
Day 32 – 29.04: A Farewell to The Lucky Umbrella
I woke up quite a while before even the first of my alarms started ringing, at around 06:00. I quickly put my laptop away after getting up and began getting ready to check out and leave for the train station. Some fifteen minutes later, I was ready to go and went ahead and double checked that all of my stuff had been packed up before going out and checking out.
There was one thing that I left back at that hostel locker: my lucky umbrella. We had a good month together, but it just had to come to an end at some point. Hopefully someone makes use of it rather than throwing it away.
The walk through Iriya (入谷) and Ueno (上野) was pretty quiet and uneventful in the early morning. It still seems quite weird to me that such a large city, a metropolis, can be so quiet. With the walk to the station done, I headed to the ticket machines.
Day 31 – 28.04: No, Not The Curry!
I woke up early-ish with my throat feeling a lot worse than it had the evening prior. I got to procrastinating, stuck to it for a while, and at some point I received a message from Brendan; he was asking if I was up already. After answering positively, he got out of his capsule and said that we should go for breakfast. I agreed and stayed behind to finish up my business as he went to check out.
I followed after Brendan, but instead of checking out, I decided to stay for one more night – something that Brendan had suggested. I handed over my keys after paying and we were on our way to get something to eat.
We walked towards Akihabara (秋葉原), searching for a place to eat breakfast at as we went. We eventually ended up going to a cafe to get sandwiches and coffee at the Akihabara station (秋葉原駅). With our breakfast dealt with, we started wandering around and looking at things. In the end, we didn’t find anything too interesting and ended up heading to see the Tokyo Skytree.
After having walked a little while after getting out of the metro station, we found ourselves at the Skytree. We decided not to get on top, so we just walked some more and stopped by a street performer called Stephen.
Tokyo Skytree (東京スカイツリー)
Tokyo Skytree is really damn high