Mundane things: Last three classes on the “Heroes and Villains” ethics topic. I took Scully for a couple of walks, and did some ball chasing with her in the park. Weather was nice today, a warm winter day.
Speaking of winter… The next meeting of my ISO Photography Standards group is in November. In Tampere, Finland. The local organiser gave us info about the city, including typical and extreme climate data. The average daily high temperature for November is 1.5°C. The average low temperature is -3°C. The record high is 11.1°C, and the record low is -22.3°C.
Now… I live in a pretty warm place. 11.1°C is… well, I don’t even know if Sydney’s ever had a winter day that didn’t exceed that temperature. It gets lower than that at night in winter, but around where I live nowhere near as low as 1.5°C.
I don’t even own clothes that would keep me comfortable at temperatures close to 0°C.
I don’t even want to think about the possibility of experiencing temperatures around -20°C. Now, if I want to travel to such a place, I need to work out how to survive. Obviously I need some serious cold weather gear.
But, apart from this three days in Finland, I’m most likely never going to need such clothes again in my life. So buying heavy winter gear seems stupid. So today I searched to see if there was any way to hire suitable clothing in Finland. Maybe something at Helsinki Airport, where incoming travellers can pick up the stuff they need to survive the weather, and drop it back off before getting on their outgoing flight. It appears that such a service actually used to exist, according to one website I found, but the link to the company offering the service was dead.
And then I found some forum posts asking the same sort of question. Almost all of the responses I found said that sure, you can hire winter clothing once you get to Lapland – the northernmost region of Finland – but nobody knew of any place you could hire winter gear in Helsinki. I quote one:
In Helsinki, if you won’t be spending long periods of time outside, a ski jacket and wearing lots of layers might be enough – such as wearing a pair or two of leggings under your jeans etc. Although I’m saying this as a Finn, who is used to the cold and doesn’t mind freezing for a short while.
Great… I don’t have a ski jacket or two pairs of leggings to go under my jeans!! I don’t want to buy a ski jacket! And even if I have all this and I’m not a hardy Finn used to freezing for a while, I’m probably gonna die of the cold anyway! “might be enough”!
Anyway, I decided to email the local organiser in Finland to see if he knows any way I can hire some winter clothing for the trip. Hopefully he’ll come back with useful information and won’t laugh at me too much.
New content today:
I hope you find some winter clothing relatively easily! If you keep us posted here, and the organizers don’t come up with anything, I could ask around too if somebody would have somehing to lend you.
For me, obviously having clothing for all kinds of weather, the most annoying weather is +3˚ C, rain and wind. It’s damp and cold.
I think it’s not often -22˚ C in January, that’s cold! We have had milder winters recently.
Ah, for some reason I read ’November’ as ’January’. Anyway, all of the above applies even more, November is wet and cold, usually.
Tampere is also mostly between two lakes so there is usually moisture in the air, and maybe not the extreme temps.
I liked Helsinki, but I was there in the summer. Never saw the rest of the country.