A wintery Tampere

It's been a few months since my last visit to Finland, so in a way I was looking forward to spending a bit of time in my home country, catching up with friends and relatives. On the other hand, I'd been enjoying lunch in a tee-shirt on our balcony on Saturday, wheres the temperatures in Finland were approaching a respectably wintery -10, temperatures I'm not that used to anymore...

Anyway, a man's got to do what a man's gotta do for his company, so off I flew to Tampere, arriving rather late at Pirkkala airport, heading straight to the Holiday Inn to catch a bit of sleep before hitting the office, fresh and well rested.

We had quite an international showup from my team in Ulm: there was one German, two Romanians, a Mexican, an Englishman, an Iranian lady and one Finn in addition to me. This meant, naturally, that we had to take them to a real Tampere institution for dinner, just to kick off their initiation to Finnish culture. So how on earth did we end up in “Viking restaurant Haral”, then ? (as I am sure you, my dear educated reader, are aware, the Finns are not really Scandinavian and hence had little to do with the vikings). Well, never mind the details, the place is quite an entertaining place for a dinner (I had a dish with the rather imposing name “Saint Olav's Sword” - not as scary as it sounds, quite tasy actually!).

After taking the mandatory touristy pictures in front of the stuffed Elk at the entrance (ah, the touristy clichés, eh?), we made our way to a more traditional Finnish institution – Teireenpeli – a Finnish pub. A few beers, and plenty of gossiping (Scott, who used to work with me in Southwood, updated me on the latest activities over there...), later, we stumbled back along the ice-covered streets of Tampere back to the hotel.

Wednesday evening; I had been invited over to a good friend of mine, Pentti, for the mandatory Finnish sauna. Great to catch up with him as well – he pretty much updated me on the ongoings at Tampere... Unlike the last sauna evening with Pentti, I was in a quite coherent state when I got back to the hotel, which is a good thing, considering I did have some training to attend to the next day...

Thursday evening was the last night out in Tampere. Olli had organised an “Imaging meeting” with current and former colleagues of him from his time in Tampere. The proceedings started in a REALLY typical pub near our offices in Hermia. Quite a few familiar faces turned up, some of whom I've known “virtually” for quite some time, but never actually met for “real”. Strangely/sadly enough, the majority of them are working for Intel or Accenture these days. Oh well, such is life, I suppose...

We later continued into Tampere town centre, to Vanha Pankki and Henry's pub, where the beer flowed... I even got into an arm-wrestling contest with Petri – much to my shock I lost with my right arm (thankfully, I got my revenge by beating Petri with the left arm, phew...).


On friday, I had time to stroll around Tampere and take in the sights during daytime, before catching my train to Helsinki... The conditions were pretty much perfect for taking some nice scenic shots with the sun shining over sun-covered Helsinki...