Saturday 28 May 2011

Turku is a happy place

I was walking home from my friend's house at 3am on Friday morning, and it was amazing to see that very far off in the distance the sky was red where the sun was just beginning to rise. It was beautiful and strange. At the moment I'm getting about five hours of darkness each night, and I find it almost impossible to believe, it's so far from what I'm used to. One evening last week I was talking to one of my English friends on Skype, it was around 10pm, and I showed him on the webcam what the sky looked liked outside. He said it looked the same as it was in England, which is two hours behind Finland. I'm sure that it's dark by 9 or 10pm there. At the moment the darkness here seems to be between 11pm and 4am. It's so strange.
Walking home like that seemed oddly magical. It's nice that I can walk home alone at night and still feel quite safe. When I lived in Canterbury I could also do that, it's smaller than Turku and very non-threatening, but there's no chance I'd do that in London, or even the city I come from. I love living here.
Yesterday was a quiet day, but I noticed something about a particular R-Kioski shop. For people reading this in Turku, it's the one in Erikinkatu next to Lidl. Every time I go in there I've noticed that the people working there are unbelievably cheerful and friendly, more so than in any other shop. Is the management putting something in the water?

3 comments:

  1. You can start preparing for that at in future there won't be darkness. You can see sun whole day and night, if it's not cloudy. I am used to it and loving it.

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  2. My younger brother was up in Lapland last week, and he said it was never dark during the nights up there. The funny thing is that it´s just gonna get lighter and lighter still ;) I live outside Vaasa and it´s quite light here during the nights, even though it still gets dark for about 3-4 hours.
    Hell, later on if you sit and watch the sunset you can just sit and wait for 30 min after that to watch the sunrise, haha.

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  3. I stayed up all last night with one of my friends (still haven't actually gone to bed yet)and I think the darkness lasted midnight-3am. Crazy stuff

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