Christmas

Misi flew to Hungary on the 21st of December and I followed him on the 23rd. I had quite a long and eventful journey. I was flying from Helsinki, so I took the 3 am bus from Tampere to Helsinki. Since had woken up at 6 am the previous morning, I thought I would sleep on the bus thus making the trip seem shorter. And I did, for about an hour. Half way into the journey this little 3 year old girl started crying. And she didn't stop for the next hour until we arrived to Helsinki... In Helsinki I couldn't believe my eyes when I realized how long the queue for the check-in was. I counted at least five different destinations in the same queue. I don't quite understand what was the logistic behind this. Every now and then a woman would come and shout out a destination and a departure time, and those who were travelling at those times would go in front, otherwise they would have missed their flights. After one and half hours I managed to check-in. Upon arrival I had the unpleasant experience of my phone not booting up. Luckily I had another one with me as well with a Hungarian number in it, so I was able to get in touch with Misi to let him know onto which Wien-Gyor train I made it. By the time I arrived, I had been up for 36 hours with less than two hours of sleep which I got on the bus and on the plane. I was dead tired, but didn't go to sleep for a while because I didn't want to mess up my rythm completely. I only went to bed around 5 pm and slept for three hours and was up for two, than went to bed again at 10 pm and had a long, lovely, refreshing sleep until 9 am the next morning. For two days we spent time with Misi's family and visited some friends. You can imagine that two days fly away quickly and on the morning of 26th of December I was in Wien again waiting for my flight back to Finland...

Guardian angels

Recently an Indian woman from our company's Mumbai office came to Finland for a couple of months. Two weeks later a few of us went to see a movie. I drove us there and promised her I would give her a ride back to her hotel. I had no idea where her hotel was. She mentioned two landmarks which were very far from each other, so she completely confused me. She knew the street name, but that didn't help me. I am terrible with street names, I always only know the main ones... So there I was, driving in Tampere without an exact plan in mind and listening to her trying to help me. I soon realized that what I was doing was not very safe: I wasn't concentrating on the driving, I was listening to her and trying to think of a way to get her home. So I decided to park somewhere to avoid causing an accident and think of a plan. Just when we stopped, my colleague looked out and said: "It's here!" She got out of the car to double check and indeed, we were parked 100 m away from her hotel!... I am not sure if it was mine or hers, but it certainly felt like an angel guided us there... :)

Finnish winter

At the end of October we all thought we just saw the beginning of a long winter. We had a huge snowfall, over 20 cm in 24 hours, which messed up the entire city. We also got stuck in the snow in the parking lot. Buses were stuck, everything seemed to be in chaos. And then a heat wave came maybe a couple of weeks later and for days on end the temperature would not go below +4C. The snow started melting, and then it started raining and by the end of November there was absolutely no sign of any snow whatsoever. Which is quite unusual for Finland. The next snow came the Monday before christmas - around 1 cm... In proper winter Finns go cross country skiing in the woods or on the frozen lakes, go skating on the free skating rinks all over the place, they even drive their cars on the frozen lakes. I don't think anyone ventured with their cars onto the lakes this winter, unless it was on a ferry... Apparently there is hardly any snow in Lapland, too. Which is utterly unpleasant for all the tourists who were hoping to see some real snow while visiting Joulupukki (Santa) in Rovaniemi. I guess the global warming really kicked in... :(