Midsummer weekend in Oulu

We left a quiet Rovaniemi on Saturday and took a short  train ride to an equally quiet Oulu. A city of 137,000, Oulu is a port city in the northwest. Although we could see cargo ships, cranes, and other signs of a working port, the waterfront area near our hotel was a broad expanse of restaurants, shops, and apartments with a large marketplace in the center.

The marketplace is guarded by Toripolliisi, a statue of a policeman.
Did I mention that this was Midsummer? Owners of the shops and restaurants had printed suljettu juhannuksena (closed for Midsummer) on white pieces of paper and placed those signs on the doors. We got very good at spotting the white sheets of paper, sometimes from a half-block away.

With more places closed, we got to walk a lot and see a very nice city. We visited Oulu's oldest church and received an informative tour from a young woman whose English was tinged, for no known reason, with an Australian accent. The church is also an access point for the city-wide wireless network.

In the small park near our hotel, we had ice cream cones. (Licorice ice cream is better than it sounds, but not a lot better.) Black-faced seagulls fussed loudly over the cone scraps that we tossed on the ground.
With most restaurants closed, we opted for the Mexican restaurant in our hotel. Hint: if you want good Mexican or southwest American food, Oulu is probably not your best choice.
On Sunday morning, we took a walk through the city's parks brings us along canals to the waterfront. The observatory at the Oulu Castle provides a wonderful view of the city and harbor.
There was a bit of activity in the marketplace. A four-piece band (trumpet, trombone, bass, guitar) played bluesy swing tunes. We tossed a few spare things into the hat when it came by. Sandra bartered for three small hand-painted plates.
The desk clerk at the hotel had recommended a restaurant on Pikisaari Island, about 1km away across a bridge over a harbor inlet. "It might not be open," she cautioned. Her hunch was correct. Nevertheless, after a bit more rambling, we found a place that was open. As with most restaurants, they had outdoor seating. We had a very good salmon dinner.
Sauna. There are, by most estimates, around two million saunas in a country of five million. Each hotel has saunas, separate facilities for men and women. (We could have rented a private sauna room in the Hotel Santa Claus for 150 things.)
Our Oulu hotel had an electric sauna and showers for washing. We wore bathing suits but weren't surprised when others did not. The heat was good, 80-85C, and dry. After sauna, we were clean, relaxed, and refreshed.
We had good blackout curtains again in our room and so there was enough darkness to sleep well. By Monday morning, the city was coming alive. The city buses, cleverly called Citybussi, made their way through narrow and often cobblestoned streets.
By mid-morning, we were on our train to Jyväskälä. We'd started to accumulate some gifts and other memorabilia, so our suitcases were become heavier. It was becoming a bit of exercise to drag our possessions to and through the train and then lift them up to the racks over the seats. We'd deliberately packed our suitcase half-full at the start of our trip, knowing that we'd fill them before the trip was over. Allowing for space is one thing; handling the extra weight is another.
We passed through Muhos, the town were my mother's family came from.

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Editor's note: the Finnish alphabet has a couple of characters that don't appear on U.S. English computer keyboards - ä and ö, as well as å, which is a carryover from Swedish. So, typing names such as Jyväskälä on a U.S. keyboard is challenging. We regularly checked email at the hotel business centers and discovered that the layout of Finnish keyboards was vexing for a while.