We came back from Italy. Just one week outside Finland. We came back and the snow was gone. Roads are now clean. The park nearby our falt is now cleared and soon it will become green again. Olga can play in the sand and run. She has to wear less clothes and this makes things easier for her. I like this time of the year in this country. Everything is like weaking up after a […]
I told already about the reserved character of the Finnish people and my impressions after jumping from Asia and being back here. But what about civility? Here I believe this country can give lessons to many others. Here’s a small example. Every morning I go to the University to work on my dissertation. I arrive at the main entrance. Lock my bicycle. Enter the main lobby. Get to the right to take the stairs to […]
Julie, Marie and Victor are three students at ISA in Lille who joined the intercultural week about living and working abroad conducted by David Hoffman of the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). They have posed me few questions about living abroad that I am happy to answer through my Ubatuba blog. With my wife Katja and our daughter Olga we have just moved back to Finland after spending 4 years in Cambodia working in development and […]
It is afternoon. Raining here in Colombo. We have packed our things and tonight will fly out. We will fly home. During this trip here in Sri Lanka I always knew that it is a one way trip and that it will end in Europe. BUt this feeling never got so real as now. To me it has been a journey in anothe rtropical country, and coming from Cambodia we would also go back there. […]
We are back in Colombo. The idea of this diary was to follow with short stories the various stages of our trip in Sri Lanka, but it did not work out very well. One reason is that during the Christmas and New Year we ahve been in very small places and tried aslo to choose guesthouses not directly in the town or village. Access to internet has therefore been reduced and so the possibility to […]
So we are now in the South. In a small fishing village called Mirissa. The new year has come and we want to wish to all of you all the best. Electricity is now out and the PC will shut down in few minutes. I do not have the time to update you about the Christmas in the mountains, the train journey to Neuwara Elya and the great views from Haputale. I will do so […]
“If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know who you are”. This is an old saying that I suppose has been coined by travellers long time ago. The need to keep a link with one own place, to feel roots and identity is in human nature. For some more than others, but it is there. I am thinking about this while in Bangkok, waiting for the taxi to pick us up and […]
So we left Cambodia. In these four years I have often thought about an article I red while I was in the preparation course with DED in Berlin in the summer of 2001. The article was written by an Italian doctor who had worked in Battambang at the hospital of Emergency, an Italian NGO. He wrote about his feeling while sitting at the departure hall of Phnom Penh airport: relief. Relief after the hard work […]
My dear Olga, I am writing this email from Shanghai, in China. Sorry for writing to you in English but I want to post this also in my blog and therefore it must be in a language that also other people can read. Our friends from abroad for example. So this is Shanghai. Someone at the conference I am attending described it as the gateway of China and maybe it is so. This large town […]
Every morning, when I cycle to the office, I cycle along the laterite road on the Stung Sen riverbank. I pass the village; see the women working in the garden and watering the vegetable and plants, pass the kids in school uniform (white shirt and blue shorts) walk to the local elementary school. At the end of the road, just before turning left to pass the bridge on the national road that cuts through Kampong […]