Unemployed in Oulu

I'm officially edumicated...and unemployed. I got my masters degree in Automotive Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg Sweden. My thesis was titled Testing and Comparison of Electronic Stability Control Systems. I took longer than planned but I'm done!

So where am I now...Finland. The northern coastal town of Oulu to be exact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulu
I moved in with my girlfriend Sanna while I apply to jobs in the US and Europe.

Here are some pictures about where I live now and what I have been up to:

This is everything I own on this side of the Atlantic.

I took a 20 hour train ride and then a 4 hour bus ride to get from southern Sweden to Northern Finland!

The old buildings and fall colors made the city quite nice but the leaves are mostly gone now.

The city powerplant...is not that exciting but I like the picture

Sanna and I live near the university in Oulu. She is in the mechanical engineering department so I got the tour. Here are the department's vehicles that the students can use:

The fire truck is a General Motors from 1928. The entire cab is wood. Ironic?

No university machine shop is complete without contraptions like this monster scooter Sanna and I are riding.

It has already snowed a couple times. We live at 65 degrees north latitude which is farther north than Fairbanks Alaska but our weather is not that harsh. We are only a 2 hour drive south from the arctic circle!

We live a few miles from the sea. During my August visit to Finland we took a ferry to an island off the coast of Oulu where many people live. The baltic sea freezes this far north so that those people can drive to their island homes in the winter!! Ice highways on the sea!!

Here I am at the beach.

And me playing in the snow:

and the reason I'm in Finland:

I am not sure what will happen next. I will have to see what companies are interested in me. Keep your fingers crossed...

Mike over and out!