Day 3: Restaurant Day

Greetings readership!

After a whirlwind first two days of facility tours, we TREEtrippers used the weekend to explore the city.  Saturday was Helsinki’s annual Restaurant Day, where dozens of locals set up tents to sell food in the local parks. Cuisines from all over the world such as Indian, Thai, African, and Chinese as well as regional cooking could be sampled.  It was a perfect day for first-time Helsinki tourists such as ourselves. 

We then walked down to the Kauppatori, the city’s waterfront open-air market.  Open daily, one can find all sorts of fruits, vegetables, seafood, and souvenirs for sale.  

Within view of the market is Tuomiokirkko, a chalk-white cathedral and arguably the most imposing structure of the city’s skyline.  

We briefly visited the church and continued on to another park.

More vendors were present, and we witnessed our first game of cricket.

Thoroughly bushed from the morning’s adventures, we returned to the hotel for a much needed nap.  Once rested, we met up with our new friends from Aalto University for the evening.  We were taken to a couple of local establishments and later had a chance to sample some late-late-night Helsinki food fare.  The nights are short in a Helsinki summer.  The sun sets around 11 and rises around 3, so witnessing the sunrise is more a rite than a task.  We returned to the hotel with a full day behind us and many more ahead of us.

Stay tuned readership.
Stephen Goulet

Day 2: Aalto

        On Friday after our time at Kemira we headed to Aalto University. I should note here is where we hit our first road bump on the trip, to our surprise we have had to this point no trouble getting to and from anywhere and finding our people. We left Kemira with the with 2 instructions 13:00, Main library at Aalto University. After a little bit of conusion about which library (there is one for each department) we made it to the library early and waited until 13:00 and no one had yet come to claim the hopefully not too loud Americans out of the Library Lobby. After about another 45mins and a few quick calls we got ahold of our gracious host Jenni ( she was told we would be there at 14:30) we were on our way (Lucky that Jenni was on campus and willing to fill up more of our time) she came by the library and gave a quick rundown of what she thought we would want to see and we started walking across campus.


        It wasn't long before professor van Heiningen rode up beside us on his bicycle (if you don't know him he is a UMaine professor who also spends time working with graduate students at Aalto) now that we had two well qualified tour guides we checked out Aalto's labs and pilot facilities. Though their pilot paper machine ain't got nothing on Jenness, we got a chance to see a pilot scale dissolving pulp spinner that's finished product was Rayon. We also took a visit to their forest products library, here we we hunted down a copy of "Smook Book" for the photo op.
 

Originally I was told that the people giving the tour would be in yellow overalls????  Questionable right?  

        Well turns out it's actually the coolest thing ever. Though it is closer to what we would call a jumpsuit, they are a bright golden yellow shade.  Here each department has a guild and about 99% of students join one. A guild is something like an AIChE or TAPPI/PIMA mixed with fraternity or sorority life. Instead of greek letters each Guild has its own color jumpsuit. The Forest Product guild who hosted us was Yellow. A few of our hosts who had come straight from work were not wearing their Jumpsuits but a few were. We toured the student museum which was about the different guilds. We also took a look at their innovative technology center which had brainstorming rooms, a "Fat Boy" room (basically a room filled with bean bag chairs), and a live video stream going both ways with Shanghai. We walked along the water and ended our tour with a BBQ on something like a quad near the library. Somewhere in there we met up with another student tour guide Minttu and lost Professor Van Heiningen. 

During the BBQ we accumulated a few more hosts including one Sakari (who we call "Sarge" due to his military rank) he managed to memorize our names and faces from the Bios that were sent out, it was impressive when he called us each by our name while introducing himself.

Here is a picture from the BBQ where our amazing hosts cooked us dinner, enjoyed the sunshine, and talked with us about everything. 
        It was a great opportunity to really get to know the culture of their University and of Finnish people our own age. All of the students we met are on a Master's track. They go into school knowing that and intending to stay for about 5-8 years. During the summers they get jobs mostly in Mills and paper related industry. One had worked at the Kemira R&D center we visited earlier and we are hoping to see Jenni and Minttu at the SAPPI Mill on Monday. It was great to be able to compare the Co-Op experience with their program.

        After what ended up being roughly 7 hours at Aalto (when the sun doesn't set it's easy to lose track of time) we headed back which brought on its own challenge. We had no arrangements on getting back and had asked our hosts about the bus which luckily left from just across the street and took us into the city. Once again our hosts proved just how amazing they were when Joni helped by talking with the bus driver when we paid for our tickets. 

Later in the evening we met up with our new found friends from Aalto to get a real taste of Helsinki.They even brought a gift after we said how jealous we were of the jumpsuits (Nick Hart is modeling below)

Day 2

        Day 1 was an absolute great day for all of us involved.  As Nick had mentioned, we were hosted  extremely well by Thermo Scientific, Neles Valves, and the Metso pilot facility. Many thanks to them.

        Day 2 started out much like day 1 with a continental breakfast fit for kings.  After the breakfast, we were ready to set out to to Kemira's R&D facility.  There, we learned about the company structure and also where the company sees itself in the future.  We then toured the facility starting with the pulp and paper chemicals area.  In order to run their tests, Kemira has replicated and miniaturized much of the wet end machinery  in order to recreate the furnish supplied to them from mills.  It was very interesting to see much of the same equipment that I used in my co-op on the counter tops of the lab.  Kemira focuses on the water involved in the process from pulping to waste water.  This was a very interesting area. 

        We also toured several other areas including the water treatment area and the polymer science area.  All of these areas consisted of top of the line equipment.  I know that Emily really enjoyed seeing these analytical tools.  Lunch was greatly appreciated and we thank Kemira for hosting us.

       We continued to visit with the kids from Alto Univesity.  They were more than friendly and we immediately felt welcomed to the foreign campus.  Even though we are from two different areas of the world, we were still very similar.  Jenni provided us with an awesome tour!  We really enjoyed our time there.  We are very thankful to them as well.  

Day 1

     We started off today with an amazing Finnish breakfast. I think it was more than any of us were expecting. This was not your traditional continental breakfast with bagels, cereal, a waffle maker, and some juice. We had eggs, porridge, doughnuts, multiple different types of bread, fruit salad, dried fruit, meatballs, coffee, tea, hot chocolate, 3 different juices, and an entire lunch meat station. It was unbelievable.

     Our first tour of the trip was to the Thermo Fisher facility in Vantaa which was one of the best office/research buildings I've ever been in. After we got our name tags we were brought into a conference room and were given a talk about the facility and what we were going to see today. We were also immediately offered more coffee, water, and these amazing apple pastries that, once we were told were straight out of the oven, we could not pass up. We learned that at this facility (that covered four blocks) is the major site for three Thermo Fisher divisions: clinical diagnostics, lab consumables, and microbiology. We were also told that they have refined their testing kits, as they called them, from these large, space consuming units to one that fit on a bench top. They had conveniently labeled the colors to these kits as blue for clinical and and green for industrial. The clinical kits are for things such as drug and protein assays where the industrial ones are for water/soil samples, the food and beverage industrial, and the pulp and paper industry. These kits take a sample of something and run them through a photometer and, by using lights at different wavelengths, tell you what is in that sample. They have also simplified them so that anyone can use it. We were then brought up to the lab to see these kits and to be given a better description of how they work. On our way there we saw an amazing break/lunch room at this facility that was complete with a person walking around giving people coffee. It was quite interesting. After another quick information session back in the conference hall, and after everyone learned the definition of a "bio break" (bathroom break), we were given a quick tour of how these kits are actually put together which was neat since the older versions of the kits are put together by one singular person where the newer kits are put together in an assembly line.

     We left the Thermo Fisher facility around 10 am and went to the Metso valve facility. This place was again one of the nicest places I've ever been to. It's amazing how much design goes into these buildings. Granted they are a lot newer than a lot of the facilities in the US but still. Here we were greeted by more coffee and tea and more coffee cake and fruit. We learned that more than 45% of Metso's valve business is actually in servicing the valves already in place. After learning quite a bit about all of the different valves that Metso produces for both the pulp, paper, and power industry and the oil and refining industry we were taken to a room that was set up as a display room for some of the valves that Metso makes at that facility. We were then taken for a trip around the actual manufacturing plant. This is where things got really interesting. At this point I , and at least half of our group, were only thinking that this place manufactured the small hand valves that we have all dealt with as co-op. We were wrong. This facility make not only those valves but valves that were up to 42 inches in diameter. This place was huge! There were so many people doing things from assembling putting together the actuators to control the valves, to grinding down the ball in a globe valve to make sure that it is perfect smooth, to dipping the valves in liquid nitrogen or lighting the valves on fire to make sure that they perform under the extreme conditions they could face on the job. There were even robots that moved pallets of parts around, and can sense when they are about to hit a human as we found out. After the tour we ate lunch at the factory's cafeteria. Again we were all amazed at the food selection. We told our guide Toni (male, not female) that we had never seen a cafeteria like this in one of our facilities back home. He seemed kind of surprised when Jon told him that he has bought lunch out of a vending machine before. It seems like the people of Finland may just not eat at home and come to work for the food since it only cost about 7 euros (9 US dollars) for a very large amount of food. We also talked to Toni about the difference in the schooling over here as compared to America and how the students over here pay (almost) nothing for school. Here is a picture of us outside of the valve facility:

 

 

      From here we went to the Metso pilot plant facility in Jarvenpaa. We weren't really sure what to expect when we came here. We were brought into a conference room, given more coffee and cake (don't worry we're being fed well), and were quickly given an overview of what Metso does as a company. It turns out that the two people who we met there both have worked in facilities around Maine such as Verso Androscoggin, New Page Rumford, and Verso Bucksport. This pilot plant facility has the ability to test for coating, calendering, web handling, reeling, and winding. This is the second largest location in Finland employing around 800 people. After our talk we were taken first to the paper testing lab, where they told us that this summer they are going to have a male "lab rat" in their for the first time in the 30 years of the facility, and then to the pilot plant. This machine is nothing like the pilot plant at UMaine. It is actually the same size if not bigger than the tissue machines at the mill I was in in North Carolina this past summer. It was really cool to see because what they make and test sometimes gets better results than what the real facility will produce. After our tour we went back to the conference room and talked a bit about our lives, what we want to do after college, and some more about the finish life. We learned that once a Finnish male turns 19 he enlists in the Finnish military for one year and then is a part of their national guard. It is a really interesting concept and our tour guides said that it forces kids to grow up a bit and start trying to figure out their lives. They said that about 6 months before a kid's 19th birthday you will start to see them running, and doing push-ups and trying to get in shape before they go off to training. This is a picture of us outside of the pilot plant:

 

     One thing that I have found so far is that everyone we have met has been quite funny. They are all very relaxed and not extremely formal but are also able to keep it very professional. It has really made these tours very enjoyable. The weather over here has been amazing so far and is looking like it is going to stay that way. We are still trying to get used to it being bright out at 10:30 but I think we'll get there.

--Nick Hart