May Day Celebrations

May Day is a national holiday in Finland. We decided to go downtown and check it out. Apparently so did everyone else in Oulu. I've never seen such huge crowds. On the way down it was standing room only on the bus for the first time, and when we got downtown, there were 100's of people everywhere, dozens of ice cream stands, candy venues, merchants, and ballons everywhere for sale. Our kids loved calling out, " Look at the Batman balloon. "Look I see a racecar one." etc.

My friend Suoma had come over earlier in the week and asked if we were going to go downtown on May Day. She told Ryan that there would be cotton candy for sale. Ryan was so excited. Everyday after that he asked me if it was cotton candy day.

We walked down to the ocean and along the river and across the bridge, and just enjoyed watching the people of Oulu enjoy their holiday.

This is an interesting tradition in Oulu. Each department at the University is given a different jumpsuit color. These jumpsuits are like the ones you would use to do maintenance on your car, but in Oulu they are your party jumpsuits. The college kids wear their jumpsuits and then when they go to different parties they get a patch which they sew to their jumpsuit. You can see all sorts of different colored jumpsuit, but we shot a picture of a guy wearing a yellow one.