April Showcase - Summer Night In Helsinki
It was mid-June and my family was visiting in-laws. I packed my photography gear one night and drove down to Helsinki to do some photography. I got some blue hour cityscapes and when I stopped to get a burger from a kiosk at the railway station before driving home, the opportunity presented itself to document what was going on around the kiosk. There could've been trouble with drunken people coming from bars and making one final stop at the hot dog kiosk before going home, already somewhat hung over. Some of the students waiting for their burgers, fries or hot dogs were being very smart, or so they thought, but there were no troublemakers at the kiosk at that time.
Helsinki Cathedral.
Right after I got out of the car, I ran into a former member of the university go club in Tampere I hadn't met in years. It turns out he had moved to Helsinki a few years ago. He had worked in several software companies and was now between jobs out of his own choice. That's when I told him he must be a bachelor living alone. He laughed and told me I was right. The was living in Kallio because the rents had been reasonable - so far. Kallio is an old working class district of Helsinki, now considered a part of the urban core, where the red light district has traditionally been (the internet has changed that quite a lot the last couple of decades). Our former president Tarja Halonen, a social democrat and the first and the only female president so far grew up there. My friend told me that gentrification is underway in Kallio. Who knows how long it will take for the character of the district to change.
Some nearby streetviews
Next I drove to St. Johns church but it turned out I should've had a shorter focal length on my lens to get it to fit to the frame. I shot some street views and shop windows instead.
There was a shop selling this expensive looking stuff and a thrift store and a cheap pizzeria right next to it. Uhh??
The place looked dead. I drove to the main railway station.
This building is colloquially called Makkaratalo ("Sausagehouse") because of the ugly bulge that goes around the facade.
A nakkikioski. I was hungry and decided to grab a hamburger. An egg hamburger cost €4.5. It was pretty good. I ate it with those guys last in the queue on the right. They thought what they had was good, too. I didn't pay much attention to what they ate and they went about eating their portions quickly. They had chips and sauce left when I looked at their portions. They were from Lappeenranta (South Karelia) and I couldn't recognize their accent. My paternal grandmother was from that same region and she sounded different and she inflected nouns in ways that these guys did not. Despite having left the region of her birth right after the war when the part in which she lived was ceded to the Soviet Union, she had retained her dialect all the decades she lived elsewhere. I didn't ask if the guys were natives to the area but they never said otherwise. But these guys looked as if they were born in the early nineties. My grandmother was born in the early tens. One middle-aged guy who joined us at the table was from Turku and I spotted that after he had said a few words. :)
