Tampere

This is a photo of our television screen when we got to our room in Tampere - the same type of screen we got at each of our hotels - a tailored message to each guest.

	Susan unpacking for the week in Tampere. We were about a five minute walk from the university where the Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education conference was held.

	Jerry standing beneath a stone arch leading to an old church.


Map of central Tampere - you can tell this is a relatively modern city, established in the early 1800's, by the regular rectangular layout of the city, as opposed to the irregular twisting streets of Medieval towns.

	Fountain in one of the many city parks. We have never seen a place with so many parks integrated into the city.

	Tampere is located along a short river between two very large lakes. As soon as the sun came up, about 3:30 in the morning, people would start sunbathing on the grass along the river banks. The sunbathing lasted till sundown, about 11:30 in the evening. It never really got dark, the few hours between sunrise and sunset were still light enough to read.

	Outdoor cafe along the River - a good Italian restaurant; they made great thin crust pizza!

	Not exactly a typical street musician - one of the hosts of the conference welcoming reception, a computer scientist, playing a saw with a bow. A mysterious "green stuff" and a less mysterious orange juice mixture were served from huge pitchers at the reception. I asked one of the servers what the green stuff was and was told (with a puzzled look) that it was "punch." We found out later that both the green stuff and the orange juice were heavily mixed with local vodka.


Orthodox church in Tampere, with lots of onion domes and gilt crosses. This was just across the bridge from our hotel.

Modern art sculpture of cut and polished granite, in front of the orthodox church. We had no idea what, if anything, it signified, but it was beautiful. You can just barely see the cross of the church at the bottom of the cut-out slot.

	Older, more traditional statue in the park. there were a pair of them here, this one depicting a father teaching his son, the other depicted a mother teaching her daughter.

	Susan at an outdoor cafe.

Susan believes you are never too old to take a turn on a swing whenever and wherever you find one.