Hotel Lasaretti Oulu

Introduced to downtown with a drunk guy urinating in the middle of main street at 4PM alongside his patient friends....with the unsurprised locals passing by. Had a good time being shoved all over the place on a Saturday night in the chilly city with great nightlife.

So all you get here is a picture taken at 3AM or so, almost as bright as day.

... I found in my Lonely Planet had yet to open for summer so I settled for Best Western at 70 Euro.

Dinner was dishes from the supermarket in Stockmann, the departmental store. I was actually looking for Grill or Pizza this time but a tour in the departmental store brought the wonderful surprise! I bought pasta, a big drumstick and, on the recommendation of the friendly lady behind the counter, some Finnish style veggie balls =). The meal was ...

Today we took a cruise through an archipelago of twenty thousand islands to Aland Finland. It was an early start so we had a huge buffet breakfast on board followed by another as much as you can eat lunch. The scenery is magnificent as well! There is free internet connection on board , handy, as we cannot access it out in the woods!!

Four days until the trip starts. We have flight tickets purchased from Helsinki directly to Seoul and the hotel has been reserved in Seoul for the first 7 nights. We chose Hotel Shilla Seoul mainly based on the good reviews it has received on sites such as TripAdvisor (#2 of 200 hotels in Seoul). We got a great deal from Hotels.com for ...

1. Weaving the Incantation 2. A Servant 3. Born From Fire 4. Towards and Against 5. The Smoke 6. Better Unborn 7. Veil of Sin (Ei ennen soitettu, ikinä) 8. Silver Bride 9. Two Moon 10. Cares 11. In the Beginning 12. Silent Waters 13. Alone ----- 14. The Way 15. House of Sleep 16. Black Winter Day 

It's Thursday and finally a little sunshine! I've spent the last few days in and around Oulu, exploring the city between burst of rain. I've only been drenched a couple times, and I manged to stay safely inside during the thunderstorm :) Oulu is a great city, it seems very clean (despite the large paper mill constantly spewing out smoke), and it's very accessible by bike - which is how I've doing most of my sightseeing. There's wonderful wide bike lanes ...

... back in coach (is it really necessary to rub it in like that?), but I did get a blanket, pillow, and eye mask which is better than nothing. and the seat beside me was empty, so I got a little bit of extra room :) Since the first flight was delayed an hour I was worried that I wouldn't have time to make my connecting flight. but not to worry, I wasn't even listed on the "time critical" transfer board, so I didn't have to ...

... grannies with push carts, and man dressed as He-Man. Afterwards, we drive out of the city and visited the Williamsburg of Finland, aka Turkansaari open-air Museum. This gave us a chance to experience Finland in its colonial years. We practiced walking on stilts, saw recreations of early homes, settlements, and such. This only set us back 1 Euro each. Before heading back to Sweden, we stopped in downtown Oulu to do some wandering and shopping. I bought some fabric at ...

... a sandwich like it was a long time I hadn't enjoy... the great thing is that they still use the stamps system which means that with that one I got a free sandwich that I can use later. We ate by the harbour market which has wonderfully coloured house and a funny little man which looks like a mao guard. Our time was short as Laura's father was coming ot pick us up and bring us to Kuusamo and they still wanted to eat before leaving for the 200km ride to Kuusamo.

Well hello everyone. Here i am in snowy Oulu. Things are going well now we're settled in our own apartment. It was a bit of a rocky start with luggage not arriving, not being able to get into our apartment, strange men in manky student halls and having to spread cream cheese with tweezers due to total lack of everything when we finally did move into our apartment! I've now started my placement in a private hospital in the middle of town. I'm ...