Posted by tags: Helsinki, Finland
As you can see from the image above, yesterday was a gorgeous, sunny day. It was so warm, comparatively speaking, that I thought that some of the snow might melt. I spent part of the day at the Viikki campus of the University of Helsinki, where the biological sciences are located. I went to a grad student seminar where a mathematical model regarding reproductive strategies (brood parasitism versus stay-at-home-and-nest versus a mixture of these two strategies) was being tested for Barrow’s Goldeneyes. It had been a long long time since I’d attended a departmental seminar, so I was very happy about this.
Before attending the seminar, I ate lunch at the wonderful public greenhouse, Gardenia-Helsinki, which is a joint project of the city of Helsinki and the University, where it is located. I managed to get a bunch of wonderful images, some of which will be popping up here over the next few days. I also hope to put together a photoessay about this greenhouse for you.
Here are my plans so far:
- Visit the Heureka, Finland’s science center.
- Attend a seminar Monday – Wednesday (?) where the graduate students in the Biology department at the University of Helsinki present their data to the public [schedule]. I will try to “live-blog” it, but may instead have to make notes and rely on those to help me later write about the individual presentations on my blog.
- Short trip to Estonia next week.
- Visit Suomenlinna with my camera again, hopefully with a native Finn whose hobby is the history of Finland, so he can give me more insight into the island and its history.
- Explore the Helsinki subways looking for more subway art to photograph.
- Explore downtown Helsinki on one of the trams, jumping off at each stop to photograph the buildings.
- Make my podcasting debut by documenting how to say three swear words (sh*t, f*ck, and d*mn) in as many languages as I can find being spoken here (at least in Finnish, Swedish, Russian and English, but I suspect there are a few more languages to be discovered here).
- Photograph one of the commuter trains rushing past my camera lens at high speed, preferably when snow is blowing around.
- Photograph a big pile of licorice.
February 26, 2009