Daily Loaf

Sturm und Drang.

Wednesday was fun. Work hasn't been quite as taxing these last few days, much less calls coming in and mostly from abroad, which means I get to exercise my German quite a bit. I forgot the keys to the car I've been driving lately (my sister's VW Golf) in Helsinki, and now that I'd gotten hold of the spare keys, I had to go to Ylivieska to drive the car back here.

Emir Kusturica, Serbian godsend to cinematography, has voiced his opinion that anything with gypsies in it instantly becomes energised, jazzed up, more alive. At the train station I run into to this roma guy in what I would expect were his late 30's. He was very very obviously drunk, but not too drunk to be able to converse intelligibly. I would have been in intensive care had I had the 2 bottles of vodka he claimed to have consumed before attacking his then half-empty bottle of Koskenkorva.

We chatted for a while about how Pomarfin shoes have really bad soles and you should take them to a shoemaker and add another layer of glue or something - which to me made no sense, I mean, why are you going to tear a sole open to add another layer of something to prevent it from tearing itself open? - and how the guy who owns the company that makes the concrete beams they're using to replace the old wooden ones under rail tracks must be filthy rich, 'cause they have like a gazillion of them already laid down and and billions more are coming.

His interest shifted to the young couple that was sitting beside him, so moved on to take a few nice pictures of the station area that had obviously seen better days.

• Behind the station platforms there's a lumber yard and a sawmill.


• Numbers hanging in the air. Decadent but charming.


• Who wants Pendolinos when you can travel on cute little two-wagon trains like this.


• After entertaining us with half-remembered Finnish tangos throughout the journey, Roma guy hooked up with Cute Young Guys.

I grabbed a meal at King Burger, the cheaply named but not cheap local hamburger joint. It had pineapple and was edible. I was left pining for some ice-cream, so I headed to Iso Kärkkäinen, the Ylivieska version of the Tuuri Brother's redneck Stockmann, because I knew they had a Spice Ice. Sales Guy was very obviously very cruisy, but most likely straight. Remind me to rant about metrosexuals one of these days. My spycam also managed to capture this inside shot of the mall-like department store. Eat that, you guard thugs!

On my way back I see this smallish sign with the touristy symbol and "Burial site of Soviet soldiers" written on it. A quick high-speed U-turn later I'm at T-intersection with no further signalling. I drive around and end up at a cell phone mast (how typically Finnish is that), but just as I'm about to give up hope a young girl walks down the road with her cat. Too spooky for me. She tells me it's not a joke, that I just have to go down this tiny forest path for a few hundred meters and it's right around the corner. Why of course, how stupid of me.

• At the end of the path you come to a gate.


• You open the gate. You see a mound.


• Next to the mound there is a tombstone with writing in cyrillic letters.

"Na etom kladiyze pohoroneno 92 russkiyh voennoplenniyh" - "At this cemetary are buried 92 Russian prisoners of war" (translation credits to Aki, he got a lubenter approbatur in Russian). Come again? PoW's, here, hundreds of miles from the border? No nice explanatory plaques anywhere, no tourist guide, no soda booth. Googled it every which way, but so far I've drawn a blank.

Fast forward 24 hours, I'm alone at the office and out of nowhere a storm breaks out. We've had massive clouds that have entailed bad bad things for several days now, but so far it hadn't rained a drop here. Nature had it's way at fixing the situation when the most torrential rain I've ever seen in Finland poured over us. It was an awesome sight, frightening but at the same time very beautiful. For almost half an hour it was raining and shining all at once. Things got really freaky when a worker of ours who is also a voluntary firefighter called me telling firealarms had gone off at our other factory - just a few minutes after I'd seen a lightning strike about 300 meters from me, in the very direction of the factory.

The pressure of the rain was such that I saw and heard car alarms going off, and as I rushed to the factory site and had to get out of the car to unlock the gates, I was instantly soaked to the bone. Fortunately, it was water that had triggered the sensors, not fire or smoke.

After yet another false fire alarm I got an update from our worker: it had been a busy day.