Winter wonderland

It was fun and nostalgic to have snow on the ground when we were in Tampere, Finland, last week. This is a view across a park toward the apartment we stayed in last August.

Here is a wintry sunset, taken from the Communication school at Tampere University back toward the river that runs through town. (In fact it became a town because the Czar gave a Scottish engineer the rights to use the rapid drop in the river to run a fabric mill.)

And here are Sandy and I looking out over one of Tampere's two big lakes on top of a sand ridge created long ago by glaciers, which is about as close to mountains as Finland comes. When Finland had its own civil war in the 1920s between Reds (local socialists and unions, which were strong in factory town Tampere) and Whites (led by more traditional business and land-owners), this ridge was the last strong hold of the Reds.

Here is one last image, of Tampere's downtown, showing snow, Christmas lights, and one of my favorite buildings, done in the style of Jugendstil, the German equivalent of art noveau.