Sikinsokin.
Sikinsokin is Finnish for “all mixed up”. And the roots of the pine and the birch (see the white bark) seem to be just that and the erosion has revealed it.
This place is in Munkkiniemi, Helsinki and is by the sea, so at high water, waves and ice may have eroded the soil.
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RO-RORO-RO means roll-on, roll-off. The cruiseferries in these pictures carry passengers as well as cars and trucks to Tallinn and Stockholm. The white ship can carry 3700 passengers and 400 cars or about 60 trucks (tractor-trailer rigs). The red ship can carry 2500 passengers and about 230 cars or 60 trucks. Both are about 30 m wide, the white ship is 200 m long and the red ship 185 m long.
The strait between islands Kustaanmiekka and Vallisaari that the red ship is going through is 81 meters wide. Imagine driving your apartment block through it.
A big part of the business of the cruiseferries has been that they’ve got restaurants and night clubs and people travel in them to get cheap booze, either from Estonia or duty free alcohol and tobacco on the ships to Sweden as they go via Aland (making a quick stop in Mariehamn), which isn’t a part of the EU customs union.
Being the kind of floating hotels and shopping malls with garages that they are, AFAIK, the ships guzzle quite a lot of fuel per passenger kilometer.
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Quench.
This hooded crow was quenching the thirst, drinking from a puddle in the sidewalk, in Hakaniemi, Helsinki, between the round Ympyrätalo and triangular Arena building. I’m guessing the puddle was less salty than the sea (which isn’t all that salty, about 0.5 % salt) and definitely less salty than the water in the puddles on the lanes for motor vehicles.
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Pörhistää.
Pörhistää is Finnish for fluffing or puffing out feathers or hair. This picture is from Xmas Eve afternoon in 2017 and the place is the passage to Kaivopiha inner courtyard, just across the street from the Helsinki Central Railway Station, a very central location. At some other time it would have been much more crowded with humans, but at that time the pigeon couple were quite free to claim the place.
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Omaisuus.
Omaisuus is Finnish for property. The juvenile gulls are fighting fiercely over the ownership of a fish (looks like a perch). The adult gull is looking over from the side. At times the adult joined the melee and in the end when the fight moved to dry land, the adult managed to pick up the fish from the ground and fly away. Sadly, I couldn’t get good shots of all the the three in fight or the adult flying away.
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Näkyvyys.
Näkyvyys is Finnish for visibility. In this sightseeing cruise (in May 2016) in the Helsinki Archipelago the visibility was OK. The freighter in the horizon was probably coming from the Port of Helsinki in Vuosaari or from some other Gulf of Finland port east of Helsinki.
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Mattolaituri.
Mattolaituri can be translated as carpet-washing pier. It is a tradition in Finland to wash carpets, especially the ubiquitous rag rugs in lakes, rivers or the sea, usually with tall oil soap, in the summer.
The practice is a bit controversial as the detergents are water pollutants. Myself, I’ve washed my carpets on the floor of the laundry room in my apartment building, but I as a kid I was often with my mom or grandma when they were washing carpets in a river.
In the bonus picture, a carpet press and beams for letting the carpets dry can be seen. The press cuts the drying time significantly.
Tall oil is a by-product of chemical pulping, along with turpentine. Tall is Swedish for pine. In the dominant kraft pulp process, the non-volatile resin and fatty acids of wood (especially pine or birch) form crude tall oil soap with the cooking chemicals (white liquor) and the soaps can be separated from the spent cooking liquor (black liquor), purified and the fatty acids used for making soap.
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Landmark.
This building is a landmark of the pastel-coloured Pikku Huopalahti residential area in Helsinki, close to downtown. The building, called Terassitalo (Terrace house) was completed in 1994. The area was built between 1986 and 2000 and it’s named after the narrow bay touching the area.
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Käytöstä poistettu.
Finnish for “no longer in use”. The pictures are from spring 2017 and taken in the Vallilanlaakso park (in English: Vallila Valley). This is what was left of the one-track unelectrified railway to the port in Sörnäinen. The port facilities were relocated to Vuosaari in the southeastern corner of Helsinki and the rails and sleepers had been removed and junked. The tunnel leads to Pasila railyard and railway station, where various shunting operations for the trains from the port were done.
The port areas in Helsinki peninsula, apart from passenger and vehicle terminals for car ferries, high-speed passenger ferries and cruise ships to Sweden, Russia and Estonia are now in the process of being redeveloped into residential areas. This process has resulted in two railways becoming “käytöstä poistettu”.
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Juoni.
The Finnish word juoni has multiple meanings. Plot (of a book or a play) or intrigue. As a geological term it means a dike. This dike is (I think) a magmatic intrusion, probably thousands of millions years old. This rock is in Kaivopuisto, Helsinki and the (otherwise) paved seaside way/path for pedestrians goes over it.
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Ilma.
Ilma is Finnish for air and also colloquially weather. In November 2017, it was windy and wet snow was falling in Hesperia park in Helsinki. With flash, it was possible to catch the trajectories of the falling snowflakes in the air (thanks for the advice in this blog a few months before, Caine).
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Hanhi.
Finnish for goose. These are barnacle geese (valkoposkihanhi, white-cheeked goose). Hanhi used to be a common word for all waterfowl. Barnacle geese love to graze on human-made lawns and grassy areas, eating (and pooping) like horses.
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Gammal.
Gammal is Swedish for old. The museum tram was made 1909 by the Swedish company ASEA and the open trailer is from 1919 and made by a shipbuilding company in Helsinki. Both have been restored in Estonia. There are museum tram rides on Sundays in the summer, starting from this place, in the Market Square.
The tram was taken out of service in 1957 and the trailer in 1952. The tram model is called pikkuruotsalainen, little Swede, as it’s quite a small two-axle tram.
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