Back in Helsinki

After a two hour train ride to Helsinki, I found myself again at the central train station, or Rautatientori, which I think means train station, or at least that's the name of the train station's metro stop. The city was somewhat familiar from my last visit, but I had to walk around a bit to find the rather impressive building seen above. I had thought it was some palatial building, but I believe it's actually a cathedral.

After my quick reorienting walking tour I once again went in search of St. Urho's Pub (next to Storyville) and St. Urho's Plate (the same menu selection I had last time; guess I'm a creature of habit). The dish is a basic steak and fries but it comes with a fried egg on top and two sausage links. Since I had missed breakfast and lunch, this really hit the spot. I got there by tram this time as it is a bit of a walk. I don't mind using the local public transportation (it's generally pretty good in Europe), but it can take me a little while to figure out how it works. Here it looks like you get a ticket that's good for an hour, but it's good for both metro and trams. Figuring out where the trams go was a bit tricky at first since I was trying to mainly use colors to match up the lines and their destinations, but it's easier once you follow the tram line to its endpoint on the map and then read the tram line number that's printed in large font. The line colors are a bit too similar to make distinguishing them easier, but it wasn't obvious to me how to match up the graphical line and the line number. I asked someone and they pointed that out, which immediately made tram navigation easy. In both cases of tram and metro, however, I managed to get on the wrong one, and had to get off and backtrack a bit. But now that I've clued in a bit, I should be able to get around Helsinki faster the next time I'm here. I think I can now manage to get around a few of the European cities with good tram and metro service, e.g., Zurich, Warsaw, and Helsinki are all somewhat similar in this respect.

Finland Blues

Yesterday I finished up my sections of the GaCIT summer school tutorials. I think it went fairly smoothly, much better than at CHI 2008, possibly because of the higher sophistication of the attendees—grad students with some eye tracking experience vs. novice users at CHI. The other contributing factor here is the week-long format compared to the compressed one-day schedule at CHI. So here I had time to set up the lab concept before letting students get their hands on the Tobiis. I think that was fairly effective (at least that's what one of the students said).

After class we went out to El Toro, as students wanted steak for dinner. Nice place with very good food. Somewhat expensive, but that's Europe on a weakened dollar. After dinner I got a tip on a live blues act in town: Erja Lyytinen.

They were great, but only played one set (and a couple of encores). Wish they could have played longer. Today's the last day of the summer school, tomorrow I'm off to Helsinki. I'll have one night there before boarding the plane home early Sunday morning. A couple people here have told me to consult the calender on the Blues-Finland web page. There appear to be two blues acts, one at the Hill Street Bar, the other at Bar Mendocino. If I could use the iPhone in Helsinki, I could probably locate these bars fairly quickly using the Google map, but I'm afraid that each map tile coming in via the cell connection would cost a pretty penny. So I think I'll have to go "old school" and carry a map around.

Tour of Tampere

Following excellent presentations of a technical nature, yesterday we embarked on a bus tour of Tampere. We drove through the city and its various areas and landmarks carrying cultural, spiritual, or historic significance. The bus was quite comfy (maybe too much so, easily prompting power naps in between stops). From what I saw at the bus stop prior to boarding the tour bus is that this kind of bus is what Tampere uses for its city buses. Nice! One of the first stops was the church pictured above. It is apparently rather famous (or infamous?) for its somewhat controversial fresco paintings. The one pictured above is of the resurrection, with the line of people at right symbolizing those arisen from their tombs on the way to heaven. There were other non-traditional depictions in the church, e.g., of death, of the 12 disciples (naked and at a very young age, pictured carrying a thorny garland), of snakes, spiders, etc. The symbolism was well explained by the tour guide, but it's a bit too lengthy for me to reproduce here.

One of the stops included a visit to a farmers' market located fairly centrally in the city. A good selection of fresh meats, fish, vegetables, flowers, and other items were available. Nothing apparently processed, all organic, with I think each shop area being individually run as a family enterprise. Even better than our only Whole Foods back at home.

Our last stop before dinner at a Viking-themed restaurant (very good, btw), gave us a view of the two lakes adjacent to the city. The city was founded here because of the 18 m drop between the lakes, which offered a source of power for the textile mill developed as one of the first major industrial employers in this area—Finlayson, a Scottish firm, if I remember correctly.

GaCIT School and Sauna

Yesterday was the first day of the GaCIT Summer School on Gaze, Communication, and Interaction Technology. The first lecture was an excellent review of visual perception, going back to notable work by Helmholtz, Yarbus, and others, and leading up to modern neurophysiological work on cortical centers implicated in visual attention. It was good to see that portions of my notes were still fairly accurate although purposefully somewhat simplistic, and that there is still (considerable) room for future work. It was rather motivating, actually. I followed this presentation with a more perhaps practical approach to collecting eye movement data that I'll follow on today.

After the lectures we all took a bus to a Finnish sauna, situated at a nearby lake. The sauna is an experience complete with dinner, the hot smoke-fired sauna, followed by a dip in the lake. The sauna and lake provide a contrast of the extremes: hot (very hot) followed by cold (breathtakingly cold, and I mean that literally). Mind you, by the second round of sauna and lake dip, the latter was much more pleasant, not as shocking, and rather quite refreshing. All in all, very enjoyable.

Room in Tampere

Finally got in to Tampere. I left yesterday at 4:00pm (EDT, GMT -5) and got in to my room here at 10:00pm (GMT +2), which would be 3pm my time. So basically 24 hrs in transit, losing a whole day. And boy am I pooped. I slept on the plane to Amsterdam, then on the one to Helsinki, but managed to stay awake on the final 40 minute hop from Helsinki to Tampere.

The room is what I consider a typical Scandinavian room that I've really grown to like from my visits to Finland and Sweden. It's small but it has everything you need and it all works. Notice the tell-tale lack of distinction between shower and bathroom floors. In the US our showers are usually "defined" by some kind of elevated step or some other kind of (fiberglass) enclosure. Here, you basically get a door. But hey, the plumbing works and you get a good shower. Constrast that with Italian plumbing for example...not as good. And remember that hairdyer? There's a normal one in here. I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep and a good long soaking tomorrow (I need both! :) School starts at 9:30am and I need to be ready.