Exploring Herttoniemi
When I left the office today, the weather was a bit too sunny and I was feeling a little too jittery to go straight to home. Instead I decided to go and pick up a geocache a couple of kilometers away, near a Bronze Age burial site next to Itäväylä road. Cycling there was very pleasant and the cache was in a fun place to find, although the GPS gave me some trouble. I’m mostly happy with the Garmin Colorado 300, but the electronic compass acts rather funky a bit too often. You have to recalibrate it quite regularily, plus for some reason even minor vibration (such as holding it in your hand that’s resting on a bicycle handlebar) makes it go wonky.
A Bronze Age burial site next to one of the busiest roads in Helsinki. The site is basically just a huge pile of rocks.
I also found someone's lodgings. Nobody seemed to be home, so I peeked in.
Pages from porn magazines, a couple of tent mattresses, an ashtray and empty boxes of ice-cream etc. Looked more like a shack built by kids than the lodgings of a bum.
When I found the cache, I was still feeling energetic and the next caches were only a bit over a kilometer away, so I went looking for them. A very nice thing about geocaching is that it takes you to places where you’d otherwise never go. Going for walks without a point bores me to tears and I rarely go cycling without any aim, but geocaches give you a good excuse to poke your nose into all kinds of places. I used to live in Herttoniemi, on the northern side, but Herttoniemenranta-area really surprised me. It was a completely different world from the area of Siilitie – clean houses, nice yards, lots of kids and a distinct smell of money.
I found one of the caches, the second one was inside a dog park, where I didn’t want to go and the third one was right next to a very busy road with a lot of people (it’s a really fucking cold day in hell before I start calling bystanders ‘muggles’). The people walking past made searching for the cache without revealing its spot pretty hard, so I left it for another time.
Herttoniemenranta seaside has nice tallish cliffs, which I’ve been meaning to check for some time now. When I returned, I arrived handily right above them – on the other side there is a harbor, which is closed with fences and barbed wire. The cliffs were surprisingly clean. I was expecting a ton of old beer bottles and stuff like that after the summer, but either it had been cleaned or it didn’t attract that many people. From the top of the cliff I noticed some old rusty barges and to my surprise a smaller tug-like boat that was huddling quite close to the cliffs.
The barges were rusty and massive. They were behind a serious looking fence, which I didn't want to try and cross in full daylight.
It was full of clothes hung up to dry, boxes of plates and other dishes also set up to dry and so on. There was a gap in the fence on top of the cliff and I just had to go through and climb down to check the boat out. The it was anchored next to a concrete ledge on the bottom of the cliffs – surprisingly there didn’t seem to be any way to the ledge apart from going there by boat, unless there was a door on the cliffside. Somehow the boat with all the stuff and the ledge was the coziest thing I’ve seen in ages.
A view from the top of the cliffs.
The boat was covered with laundry and all kinds of stuff.
There was a barbeque, plants, more clothes, ornaments like the small lighthouse, and all kinds of small stuff on the ledge. It looked like like someone's front yard.
When I was pedaling back towards home, I was feeling good and peaceful. I’ll have to get a few proper urban exploration trips done before the end of the summer – maybe a certain abandoned prison or a factory, or a Russian era ammo dump. Poking my nose into old ruins and often just poking my nose into places a bit off the beaten track always manages to put me in a strange but very good mood. It’s kind of peaceful, timeless and weird in the sense that I feel like I was remembering something very old. I can’t place the memory and strangely enough I remember feeling like that when I was a kid too. I wonder whose memories do I have.
Nevertheless, feeling good and peaceful. Now a bit of gaming, some food and then early to bed.
Welcome to Kurvi
My current workplace is situated near Kurvi, which is a smallish region in Helsinki’s Sörnäinen district. Sörnäinen is next to Kallio, which is known for its many bars, prostitutes and drunken people having fun – so generally it’s a pretty merry area. Most of the serious drunks and addicts seem to get pushed to Sörnäinen, and if you want a tour of what the holes in the social security net let through, feel free to visit Kurvi – day or night.
I usually have my lunches in Kurvi’s Picnic-cafe, which is the only place where you can get a light lunch. It’s always interesting to see what you can spot during the three block walk there. If nothing else, at least you have the table full of old convicts in the cafe talking about their court cases and jail time loud enough for God and his subtenants to hear.
What Kurvi offered me today was a guy who looked like an ex-con in his 40s, sitting on the steps of the office of children’s psychiatry, hugging a deflated sexdoll and listening to a transistor radio going full blast, which he was pressing tightly against his ear.
When I walked past the spot a couple of hours later, the only sign of him was a discarded latex glove.
Yeah, welcome to Kurvi.
Radiokatve Jam Session
Our band projects Älymystö and Radiokatve have been leading a rather quiet time for the last year or so, for various reasons. With Älymystö we are still working on the new release, but for Radiokatve Ripa and I have been too busy. We would have had a gig last spring, but I happened to get a nasty goddamn ear infection from diving. Playing on a noise gig with an ear that’s too painful to even touch, nooot a fetching idea.
Today we finally managed to kick together a jam session in Ripa’s place. Ripa had replaced the handheld radio with a bigger one and he had rigged a metal bowl on a stand, which made nice and haunting noises when played with a violin bow.
Well, playing takes practice – news at eleven. What I got out of the theremin sounded godawful at first. We played for or five pieces, which we also recorded. The last two started sounding bearable. I managed to find singing birds from the theremin for one of them and cavey windy sounds for the latter. Who knows, maybe we’ll manage to come up with some kind of an EP or something before the end of the year.
Ripa's musical bowl.
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