Hi Michael.

Great journals! I'm just catching up to what you have been doing. The forest in Finland is beautiful (and looks a bit like here!) What fun to discover something new! That doesn't happen every day. I appreciated your comment about how you couldn't see them one day and then with your trained eye, you could see them the next. This reminded me of a trip I took with an archeologist in NW Alaska....same thing...I couldn't see house pits anywhere! Then after working with him for a few days, I started seeing them EVERYWHERE. Turns out that I was camping next to one for several days and didn't even know it :) It was fun to imagine what it was like for the people that used to live there and what they were seeing and doing in that very spot, thousands of years ago.

Keep those eyes open and here's to more discoveries!

Michael Wing

Oulu has a lot in common with Fairbanks.  Like Fairbanks, it is a university town and regional center, and is about the same size and almost exactly the same latitude as Fairbanks.  It's much less isolated from the rest of its country, though, and has a damper climate. 
The University of Alaska is a bigger, more impressive place than Oulu University, but the latter has a very strong reputation in computer science.  
Yes, the forests around both places do look very similar.  What my photographs don't show very well, though, is how much wetter Finnish forests are.  In fact, if the forests didn't have these man-made drainage ditches running through them everywhere there would be no dry land at all.  
"Finland" and "Suomi" (the Finnish name for the country) both mean "boggy place" in their respective languages.
yours always, Michael Wing