We had a questionable honor of being invited to Helsinki for work-related reasons in late November. It is the time of the year that people living in Finland don’t particularly enjoy, griping all the time about darkness and the drab weather, but even less us expats consider a prime time for a vacation. Despite the weather, our trip was a success — the weather wasn’t much worse than in Geneva from where we flew, although this is how it looked in Grenoble when we left:

We managed to fit  a couple of morning runs into our busy schedule: the first one around Töölönlahti and the other one around Hietaniemi to Lapinlahti.

Besides some meetings, the main purpose of our visit was AI Day 2019 (a meeting on artificial intelliegnce) that was held in Dipoli, the main building of Aalto University in Otaniemi, Espoo (Helsinki’s neighbor to the West), these days very conveniently accessible by the new metro line. Dipoli was designed by the architect couple  Raili and Reima Pietilä in 1966. I have very fond memories of the building and the campus in general; when I was in the elementary school my father used to study there (then called Helsinki University of Technology), and me and my brother often took trips there to check his exam results on the notice boards (my father was working full time at the time). I also really like the red-brick architecture.

The next day it started raining, so it was about the time to say goodbye to Helsinki for now.