Alexey Smirnov's blog

After living in Tampere for a year and a half I have relocated to Helsinki. While on vacation I have tried to summarize what I have been doing during this time. In a few words, we have had great fun in Tampere! I think this is a unique city that offers lots of opportunities for sports and cultural activities.

It is deeply connected to the history of Finland, in particular to the period of industrialization. Swedish businessmen have built lots of factories there. This is why there is a special dialect of Finnish language in Tampere – people are saying moro which is based on a Swedish good morning. Tampere is a beautiful city with rapids and two lakes – one on the north, another on the south. Boat trips are available on these lakes, for example to a neighbouring island of Viikinsaari. There are several saunas in Tampere – a 100-year old Rajanportin and Rauhaniemi in which you can enjoy ice-swimming. These activities are very refreshing, indeed Finns are saying that you are re-born after attending a sauna.

When I arrived to Tampere I was looking for an apartment near a park. Usually, such areas have better air quality and also I am a long distance runner. There are two big parks in the city – Kauppi and Pyynikki. But I found something better than this. I have rented an apartment in Hervanta – the whole region of the city located in a forest! It is a lot of fun when as soon as you walk out of your apartment you find yourself in a forest where you can jog or ski in the winter. Within walking distance there is a hill suitable for downhill skiing. I enjoyed this so much during weekends in the winter!

Tampere is located closely to Himos – a downhill skiing center, one of the most popular in Finland. During the winter we used to go there in the evenings on the working days. Of course, I spent there almost every Saturday from January to March.

Healthy lifestyle indeed. But culture-wise there are lots of things to do in Tampere. There are great museums of art and industry. There is a museum of Lenin where I learned that Stalin and Lenin met there for the first time. There is an amusement park with aquarium and dolphins. Not far from Tampere there is an old castle Hameenlinna. There are three gorgeous museums in this small town. A few of them deal with Russian history, this is why it is a must see for a Russian.

There are several cathedrals in Tampere including a Russian Orthodox Church. There are organ concerts in Tampere Cathedral which I enjoyed so much.

I have also attended a few ice-hockey games of Finnish SM-league and wholeheartedly wished success to the local teams – Tappara and Ilves. Once I have attended a game of Russian national team against Finnish team. And of course, I have eaten lots of makkara – a traditional Finnish sausage.

Tampere offers great opportunities for living a healthy life while being culturally connected with the rest of the world. I will miss Tampere but I am looking forward to having fun in Helsinki – a European capital. I have never lived in such a big city before. I am already overwhelmed with its beautiful architecture, boat cruises, and I have been to Hartwall arena earlier. Lots of world stars have their concerts on this arena. This is a great time indeed!

This is a nice time when the summer has already started but the vacation has not begun yet. The weather allows to enjoy the outdoors activities. Of course, there are lots of things to do on a weekend, like cleaning up the apartment, reading the books, working on computer. But I give myself a break and embark on a journey to see what Tampere has to offer. I am quite surprised that after spending year and a half in Tampere there are lots of interesting things to do. And I only wonder what I was doing last summer.

Anyway, I have decided to officially measure the time it takes to get from home to Dynamo building where company’s office is by skates. Now I have Nokia 5800 device with GPS and I am using sports tracker application. Here is the map which you can click to get the statistics.

Then I watched a nice performance on the stadium. It is something in-between aerobics, circus, and sports. Very worth seeing! Normal people are doing cool things together. It was a 2-hour concert.

Nice rotations high above the ground, in the middle of the video. I think it is quite dangerous.

I like this gigantic equipment.

Here I have used the zooming feature of Qik. It is a very nice video streaming application indeed!

Then I went shopping to Stockmann. After a while I returned to the stadium to see if there are any other events. There was nothing going on but I saw a boat on Laukontori pier and decided to check it out. Well, it is nice when you can just hang out during a weekend without forcing yourself into doing lots of necessary things. I went on a boat trip to Viikinsaari Island. I think that air is fresher on the island than in Hervanta which has lots of trees. On the lake it is a lot easier to survive the heat of the summer. There is a nice park on the island as well as restaurant and concert hall. The battery in the cellphone had no more energy so I have not taken any pictures there.

It takes 20 minutes to get to the island, the cost of the roundtrip is 10 Euros.

I have visited an exhibition of a prominent American painter originally from New York. That was the first show of Alex Katz in a museum in Nordic countries. He was never considered as a mainstream painter because he painted ordinary people, American middle class. This is why the notable intellectuals professors Randy Katz, Boris Katz, and Victor Katz did not make it to his paintings.

Traditionally, the art deals with painting notable people or interesting historical events in which ordinary people may take place. Using ordinary people in ordinary circumstances is not considered art. If nothing interesting happens then why should we paint those people? I guess the exhibition of Alex Katz gives answer to this question.

To me the people that he paints look mostly like Abraham Lincoln. I guess this is the favorite politician of Alex Katz. Or possibly people in New York City are his followers. What makes the exhibition interesting is painting technique that Alex Katz developed. At first, his paintings look a bit cartoonish, like what children like to see. But then you can discover the deep meaning encoded into seemingly simple images. With only a few strokes, Alex Katz manages to transmit complex feelings of human nature.

Painters typically consider eyes as the most important part of human’s face. They put all their efforts in painting eyes. The rest of the face does not matter. In Alex Katz painting every part of face is equally important, in part because of vivid colors that he uses to depict the nose and lips.

There are paintings of landscapes in the exhibition such as forest and brook, I guess those were made in Maine where Alex Katz resides during summers. The drawing technique is quite simple but nevertheless he conveys the fast changing mood of brook or rainy forest. Expressiveness of his paintings is what makes the exhibition interesting.

This Thursday was a short day because the coming Friday was first of May – the workers day or Vappu in Finnish. As many of us decided to stay in Tampere and the weather was very nice we had a party and played Molkky. This is a traditional Finnish game in which the goal is to accumulate 40 points. Each of the sticks has a number written on it, from 1 to 12. If you hit just one stick you get that number of points. If you hit N>1 sticks then you get N points. If your total gets more than 40 your score is reset to 20.

Playing this game is a lot of fun. The strategy is different on different surfaces. We have played on grass, gravel, and sand.

Today in the morning I saw the cleaning machines. They remove the gravel on the road, thus making it possible to skate. It is nice to see such visitors in the quiet neighborhood. I guess cleaning in the residence areas is better than on the main roads and this is another reason why I like to walk in Hervanta.

In fact, I skated yesterday but found lots of gravel. Thus skating was not safe enough and today I walked to the office as usual.

It looks like after extremely cold April the normal weather will come. The April was the coldest in 100 years though. For example, when I was participating in a half-marathon in Seinajoki in the end of March it was 0 centigrade and I was expecting +5 or so. In the end of April it was actually below freezing. There is still snow in the forests and on the hills.

Last week I have watched a spectacular game here in Tampere. Russia was playing against Finland. Previously, I have been to the Finnish SM-league games only which of course are also quite entertaining. However, I found out that when the players represent their country they play with doubled effort.

I liked the game even though Russia lost 2-4. The Russian players look quite differently from Finns. They are much leaner, they are playing ice-hockey like an art. It is a common saying that when they try themselves in NHL they find it very difficult to stay on the pit long enough to touch the puck because the defenders push them away. Being able to survive in the vicinity of opponent’s goal is a key component of ice-hockey as a team game. Russia did not succeed in this component as Finns are obviously bigger guys. However, individual play of Russians was very impressive.

The Finns were in power play when a Russian player was able to run across the whole field, deceive a defender and the goalkeeper to score a goal in the upper corner. When another goal was scored the shooting angle was nearly flat, that is the Russian player was nearly on the line of the goal. The puck went into goal from goalkeeper’s back.

I was surprised to see the open hockey that the teams played.Russians demonstrated pressing even when Finns were in power play. I think Russians were a bit opportunistic whereas Finns played more standard ice-hockey.

As I found out that the game would take place only an hour before the game began I did not have time to pick up my Panasonic with 12x optical zoom. Thus I used the built-in Carl Zeiss camera of my Nokia 5800. I found its quality pretty good. It supports digital zoom and obviously image stabilization. I remember that taking pictures with zoom using an earlier camera was prone to blur. This camera has lots of options such as contrast, exposure, gamma correction. During the weekend I learned how to upload the pictures to the web easily. The default firmware has Flickr support. I found out that there is a nice web application Pixelpipe which connects your phone with over 50 online galleries. Thus it is possible to overcome the limitations which a free account imposes.

That ski-jumping facility actually works!

While watching a few ice-hockey matches in SM-league I often noticed things to improve. Last Saturday I saw an almost perfect team – Jokerit. They are in the 3rd place at the moment but during play-off they will certainly shoot for the championship.

Individually strong and very fast. Good at defending. Their opponent in this match, Ilves was not able to score during any power play. Jokerit has long-distance shooters that are capable of scoring from the blue line.

We also played ice-hockey at the company. As a team building event we organized a party that included ice-hockey, football, and sauna. This was the first time I tried to play ice-hockey. I only started skating this winter. A week before the game I got a stick and tennis balls instead of puck, then we practiced ice-hockey. Of course, it depends on the speed with which you want to play. Doing it slower is not difficult but in any real game speed is an important component of success.

When we began playing a real game I realized that I am quite a dangerous player. Hitting the ball with a stick is not easy. Whenever I tried to do this I missed the ball then the stick was going up. I almost hit a few players. Finnish guys are very good at ice-hockey. It turned out that they play in in school. Thus I decided to avoid hitting them with the stick and played as a goalkeeper. Overall, I enjoyed the game.

I was in theater watching Gogol’s Revizor. Of course, it was in Finnish but this was a Russian novel so I felt obliged to check it out. Another reason was Gogol’s 200-year anniversary this year.

The theater is Tampereen Työväen Teatteri which is located next to Lenin museum. I guess this is why there was so much connection with October revolution of 1917 which happened almost a century after what Gogol describes in his novel.

It is always funny to watch how foreigners perceive Russians. The American movies often portrait Russians as wild people from cold Siberia with balalaika and vodka. The former was not present this time, but vodka was definitely there. But can you imagine how Finns thought Russians drink vodka? With such a care as if they were drinking a precious wine!

Next, in which type of houses do people live in Russia? Of course, in multi-storied castles! This construction was definitely nice, I really appreciate the effort of the theater to build a three-storied building resembling Turku castle, but what does it have to do with Russia? To make it more realistic they could have added a roof, instead the castle was going to the skies without any roof at all.

I learned that Russians take special care of their hair. Those guys had really fancy stuff on their head. People in Europe might have had it but I doubt that Russians wore artificial hair at that time.

Last but not least, the music was very unusual. Here is a list of what was played along with a 19-th century novel:

• Marsh, marsh vpered, rabochij narod – Go ahead, fight working people a song from October Revolution of 1917
• Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet – Prokofiev is 20-th century Soviet composer
• Vysotsky. Friend’s song – Vysotsky was a popular writer and singer in 1970s.

I don’t know if there was any special meaning in using modern music with a 200-year old novel, but that looked funny.

But Finnish actors were really good. Also, the spirit of the novel was preserved – very ironic. For example, they were smoking cigarettes all the time so the spectators were able to smell the spirit of Russia. In addition, there was an imitation of love, also one actor got almost totally naked. This is how they wanted to show the corrupt nature of the Russian people that the novel describes. So it was very satirical indeed. Russians look like total barbarians.

I wonder if Gogol had that in mind when he was writing the novel. Were any good qualities of people described in his novel? This makes me want to read the novel again.

In the Finnish interpretation there were no good people in Russia, I guess this is the tough memories of Soviet Union – a mighty dangerous neighbor. But was Tzar Russia any different? Those people were naive, so their bad deeds were funny. In this novel the people were trying to outsmart themselves.

The Finnish audience was a good one. Surprisingly, there were no students. In theaters in Russia and in the US there are lots of young people. However, such an older audience is very calm, they listen and watch very carefully. But they rarely laugh.

Overall, very interesting attempt at interpreting Russian life with a bit of European formality.

In Finland, there are two distinct phenomena associated with lighting conditions. In the summer there are white nights when the sun never sets down. It takes a while to get used to sleeping during those nights. In the winter it might happen that the sky is gray during the whole day. It feels chilly on such days. This is why there are so many electric bulbs in Tampere. I noticed it soon upon arrival that people here like various electrical equipment. For example, they have bus schedules near each bus stop which are made of the bulbs as well.

I have taken pictures of these nice figures. As you can see, a whole story is told using this innovative form of art. And it makes life so much more exciting.