Kimmo with the S&W 500S Revolver
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

Yesterday was Kimmo’s birthday, and to celebrate he’d arranged that we’d go to a shooting range and fire some guns. We started with firing 50 rounds each with a Glock 9mm pistol at 50 metres range. Then Kimmo got a special surprise – his friend at the range let him fire one shot with the Smith & Wesson 500S revolver, which fires .50 magnum bullets, i.e. half an inch in diameter. Think Dirty Harry, except this was the next size up. Even with our ear protectors, it was very loud – it felt like a firework had gone off next to us.

Finally, we each got a chance to fire a full magazine of bullets from a ‘Suomi’ sub-machine gun, an almost legendary Finnish gun from the second world war. It was surprisingly stable – long bursts tended to drift upwards, but short ‘squirts’ of 3-5 bullets stayed very much on target.

Naturally we kept score: with the Glocks, we counted the points properly; with the Suomi, we just counted how many bullets were inside the outer ring. The results:

So with the pistols, I got more than the other two combined :-). I think I gloated a little too much…

We recorded videos of the Suomi firing:

• Kimmo firing the Suomi sub-machine gun
• Mike firing the Suomi sub-machine gun
• David firing the Suomi sub-machine gun

Afterwards we went to Black Door to tally our scores and have a couple of beers. James joined us there – next time, I think he’ll be coming along to try out the guns.

This was my first time ever firing a gun, and I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much – it’s not really my thing. But actually holding and firing the gun felt no more scary than using a powerful electric drill, and it was fascinating to try and hold the gun steady to get the bullets on target. It didn’t hurt that I did better than I expected :-).

Eve & I have recently been looking for a new flat – one with the bedroom facing away from the street (or at least to a quiet street), and with a second bedroom to use as my study. Although we love living in Kallio the flats there tend to be one-bedroom or studio flats, and hence most of the flats we visit are in the more expensive Töölö area. Today we saw some nice flats, naturally just above what we’d agreed was our upper price limit. We’ve some thinking to do.

As usual with these Töölö trips, we included a visit to one of our favourite pubs, Vastarannan Kiiski (the name is a humourous Finnish phrase: a ‘kiiski’ is a ruff, a type of small fish, and ‘vastarannan kiiski’ literally means ‘ruff at the opposite shore’, but actually means one of those people who always takes the opposite viewpoint). This pub is one of a chain of very nice pubs which specialize in having a very wide range of beers from different countries. Here’s the list of bottled beers:

Bottled beer list

They also have a dozen or so beers on tap, and currently an American week with another 19 American small-brewery beers:

American beers

Yes, we all know the joke about American beers, but that refers to the mass-market beers like ‘Bud’. If you get a chance to try these small-brewery beers, don’t miss it!