WPC 33 was held in Helsinki, Finland. Know for, among other things, being the home of Nokia and being a place where the sun barely sets.
This likely will have been my last WPC meeting. Scott and I announced a few weeks before that we would not be up for re-election as chair of the LPWG and MPWG respectively. This is both happy and sad for me – being chair of a workgroup was not my favorite thing to do, and I will certainly enjoy getting back to more ‘real’ engineering. I did enjoy, and will miss the travel and fun that the group had though.
Sunset was at 10:55 and sunrise was at 3:55, so there were about five hours of night, but it never got dark enough that you couldn’t comfortably walk around without any artificial light. This meant that we did a lot of walking around and drank a lot of beers, and ciders – the Finns are apparently fond of both apple and pear cider. We ended up staying out until after 2 the first two nights and staying up until sunrise 3:55 the last night.
The first night, after some difficulty, we had dinner at Savotta – a restaurant remembered by Scott and others for being in what appears to be a converted bomb shelter and serving reindeer steaks. Oddly, when we arrived, they turned away a couple saying they were almost closed, but then decided to let us in. I can only assume that they decided we were tourists and would spend enough money to make it worth their staying a bit late. I think we lived up to their expectations.
[Not a valid template]The next few nights we basically just stayed up, running around the city from bar to bar. Sometimes with a group of our WPC friends and sometimes on our own. I’ll leave most of those pictures to be explained by their captions below.
We flew out through Amsterdam, so we had one night to kill there – which, in being consistent with the past nights, ended up going until 4AM or something.
An older Mini, but a similar enough color scheme that I took a picture for Patrick.
Found these guys on our first evening wandering around.
Helsinki Cathedral as viewed from Helsinki Senate Square, just across from Savotta.
The sampler platter of Finland's delicacies to start dinner at Savotta. Top to bottom, left to right: smoked salmon, smoked pike, roe spread, beets or pickled cabbage (I think), potatoes, olive-caper spread, not sure of the pinkish meat, lingdon berry jelly, bear sausage, reindeer tongue, brie, and ???.
A Dollar bill for WPC 13 that was hung on the wall the last time our group was there, five meetings before I started going.
Our table in the back of the 'bomb shelter'
The dessert menu stamped into a log.
This art was referred to as the bowl of broccoli due to the trees sticking out over the top.
Not sure what this was.
This was the train station at 1AM, it's hard to convey lightness in a picture because cameras can do a pretty good job of normalizing to a properly exposed shot, but this is the best I could do to show the relative brightness in the middle of the night.
WTF??? - Helsinki Lizard Boy statue, or something.
Old style ship on the Helsinki South Harbor - found this when I went out wandering after my meetings for the day were over.
We had this at the group dinner - it was not good.
I had to find time to chase down some wildlife - Barnacle Goose on the island where we went for the group dinner.
I found the geocache location the previous afternoon, but had to return at night to actually get it due to the people. Second Helsinki geocache. I left the Happy Smurf Rammi trackable in it in hopes that some other international geocacher will get him to India as is his goal.
The dollar bill from WPC #4 in Amsterdam. The other guys had tried to find this for a while and finally we did. On what was possibly our last WPC trip.
Amsterdam canal by night.
