Urban Exploration: Downtown Railroad
Yesterday the weather was perfect. It was sunny but not too warm, a great day of zooming around the city with a bicycle. After I left work I cycled to Ruoholahti to the Oxygene diving store to get the diving light I had decided to buy on impulse, while cursing my current flashlight on the diving boat last Wednesday. It’s high time Susi and I will have some proper underwater lighting.
When I got out of the shop and stopped to admire the weather, just the idea of going home and indoors felt positively unpleasant. Luckily I remembered a small scale urban exploration project that I had been thinking about for quite a while.
In the western part of Helsinki downtown there is a deep trench, which used to have a railroad on the bottom of it only a few weeks back. It started on the seashore and connected to the main railway system literally across the street from the House of Parliament. A couple of weeks back they ripped up the railroad tracks, but the trench with the bridges is still there.
The railroad trench is hardly a unique find, since tens of thousands of people cross it daily. For most of the people it’s kind of unspace: something you see, wonder about for a moment and then forget. For three months or so I crossed the tracks twice per day when on my way to work or home, but now I finally got around to checking it out.
Not every UE trip has to be about a massive ruin far away, quite often just seeing your everyday urban surroundings from another point of view is at least as enlightening and interesting as a ruined factory or an abandoned house – often even more so.
(Check out more photos in the Flickr photoset!)
Judging a Book by Its Cover: “Aaltojen alla”
When I go diving, I’m equally interested in the marine life and the wrecks – quite often my wreck exploration goes on a hold for a moment, because I’ll just have to see some little underwater critter up close. The Baltic Sea isn’t an overflowing cornucopia of diverse marine life, but there’s a lot to see under the surface: fish, crustaceans, shellfish, medusae – even things you really wouldn’t expect to see here in the north, like varieties of sea anemones, sea horses and biofluorescent comb jellies.
I finally got around to buying a book called Aaltojen alla (Underneath the Waves), which was recommended to us by a couple of divers we know as being the best practical guide of Baltic marine life available. I’ve been leafing through it for a couple of days, reading about and trying to recognize things I’ve photographed and seen. All in all, the recommendations were spot on. There’s just enough information for Sunday biologists such as I, plus the illustrations and the photographs both look good and make it easy to recognize the species in question. All in all, I can heartily recommend the book for every diver who is interested in the marine life of Baltic sea. The web page is also pretty nice, but unfortunately the English version is still under construction.
There is only one thing I did not like about the book: the cover. I mean, what the hell, look at that photo and the layout and imagine it in full size, so that 90% of the contrast just vanishes. Ok, it’s pretty descriptive of what you can see underwater in the Baltic Sea when you look up or forward: just a few meters mushy greenness with some distant blobs and shapes, but shit – as a book cover it utterly sucks. If I saw a book cover like that on a bookstore shelf, instead of checking it out I might just fall asleep on my feet, fall down and hurt my head. There were a lot of brilliant photos in the book, so why choose this?
In any case, to reiterate – cover aside, if you want to know more about the wriggly things you see underwater around here, go and buy the book. Well worth the money.
Company Sailing Trip
Our company’s spring picnic was a bit different this year. Quite often generic company fun days seem to be just about going to a restaurant to grab a steak and two to twelve beers, but this time we went for a few hour sailing trip on the sea in front of Helsinki.
I wasn’t feeling too well during the day and couldn’t tell if it was allergy or an incoming flu. Late in the afternoon I was feeling so shitty I was ready to skip the whole thing and started off for home. Getting out of the hot and stuffy work room into fresh and cool air and grabbing some medication made me feel well enough to grab a cab and arrive at the pier in the last moment before the boat left.
Before this I’ve been on and piloted only small and mid-size motored boats and a catamaran, so it was my first time on a sailing boat. Getting into a good wind where the boat tilted enough for one side to be pretty much on level with the waves was really fun. Everybody had a chance to try their hand in piloting the boat, but I had started to feel too feverish and achy to trust myself on the helm, so I settled on watching the beautiful seascape and wondering, if we were going past any familiar diving sites.
More pictures in Flickr, once again.
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