unikuva.net blog

Couple of weeks ago I spent a nice Sunday driving from Niinisalo to Ruosniemi with a handacar. It was fun. The sound that the thing made when going fast was like an old steam locomotive. All of it – the sound, the handcar, the unused railway – made me feel like I was handcaring myself backward in time. Or outside time, to be more precise.

It was fascinating to travel the 54 kilometers from Niinisalo to Ruosniemi in such an old fashioned way, with muscle power, on rails. And it was fascinating to watch how nature was taking over this once busy rail.

There hasn’t been any train activity on this route in 25 years. The rails and bridges and all would have been demolished totally if some active people wouldn’t have thought about making this a route for handcaring. I think that it was wonderful of them to save this railway. It would have been a real pity if it would have been destroyed.

So if you come around here and want to try handcaring here’s were you need to click. You don’t have to handcar the whole way, shorter trips are possible too.

In January I shoot photos for a strory about Länsi-Suomen rukoilevaiset. I don’t have any idea what rukoilevaiset might be in english.. It’s a movement inside the church. They for example won’t accept women priests. And they use 200 years old translation of the bible, because they find it better than newer translations. And the psalms they sing are that old too. They think that the old translations and psalms speak of things with their real names. Sin is sin and the words aren’t softened to please the hearer. They ring more true to the ears of the members of this movement. They also pray down on their knees at least once during the service.

What surprised me was the amount of young families. There were lots of kids, and they had Sunday school during part of the church service. Which was very long indeed. Still, it was an interesting experience to take part in their church service. And all that I wrote above are my observations, and not necessarily the official facts about this movement. Anyway, it was strange to shoot during the service. The whole thing was done as if it was still the year 1706 (or something like that). I tried not to disturb, but it’s hard to be invisible with a camera like that. All in all I’m happy with the photos. But to be honest, I really did get my yearly dose of old slow, heavy psalms during that Sunday.

Yay! For once I got to do something fun! Usually it’s the writer who gets to try everything instead of the photographer. This time there were no volunteering writers. Can you believe that?! Who wouldn’t want to try something like this, and even better: for free. So I was asked to try it out and of course I said yes. And it was nice :) The weather was amazing, the sun was shining and it wasn’t too windy. The company that arranges parasailing at Yyteri is Cottonring. Parasailing is very comfortable way to “fly”. I hardly noticed lifting up and coming down, it was all so smooth. The guy in the pictures saw me in the sky and came to ask if he could try it out too. The interesting thing was that he was afraid of hights, and wanted to face his fear. Respect!

Here’s a few shots of me myself and I. It’s not too easy to shoot oneself in the air. I didn’t want to drop the camera or get tangled in the cords. And since we were heading straight to the sun, the camera made an ugly shadow when I tried to point it towards my face. But still, nice to have these in my own archive :)