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 […]
So what to say? It now three months we are back in Finland after so many years in Cambodia and the real impact of change starts to become more vivid just now. One main difference which is very easy to spot is the silence in public places, the soft noise in the streets where cars run modern engines that are almost noiseless. Then there is the silent and reserved character of the people. This is […]
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 […]
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 […]
Thirty years have passed since the North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon, marking the end of the American war, as it is called in this part of the world.
Today I received an email from a friend from Finland. It was a forwarded message that found its way until my PC here in Kampong Thom, Cambodia click after click, along a strange and unforeseeable sequence of connections. It had an attachment a picture of a young child, of two year of age who has lost his parents in the Tsunami that hit Thailand almost two weeks ago. He has a Scandinavian face, blond hairs, […]