Posts from — July 2009

I’ve still got sand in my shoes and I can’t shake the thought of you.
I know we said goodbye, anything else could have been confusion, but I want to see you again.

For the record, this is not going to be a very informative post. So I apologise in advance. It’ll be closer to a diary entry.

Well, I’ve got sand in absolutely everywhere now. In my room floor, in my bag, in my shoes, in my hair, and most of all, inside the fabric of my bikini, somehow it goes in but doesn’t quite come out… I hould know more about the laws of physics to figure out on how to get it out. I am seriously going to tip the maid who cleaned my room today. They must get a lot of sandy bathrooms, but mine was seriously like hairpin and sand explosion in the morning.

It was one of those nights. You know the ones. They make films of nights like last night. I feel blessed to experience them in my First Life though. Last night reminded me so much of another night in my life, after which I felt pretty much the same. I feel blessed that this time I don’t have to walk through Rome in a hangover like I did back then. Because just getting yourself out of the bed is a serious effort.

I’ve been to Greece for a week now and it’s time to leave. This trip I has been a special one. It certainly has made me friends for life, it’s incredibly hard to say goodbye to Daniela. One more dinner at the hotel and definitely an early night. It’s been one of the best weeks in my life.

I lost the lens cap of my camera, seems like a fair price for it all. My work here is done.

Kati’s personal smallish advice for surviving in Greece

1. Bring sun cream. Cover your nose, your ears and specially your back with it. Your legs can also burn so pretty much more the cream on the better. Of course this is also the possible way to socialize with attractive fellow travellers or Greekmen “Could you do my back?”
2. Drink all the time. This means you’ll need about 4litres of water every day and you’ll get very familiar with the local loo facilities and their cleaning ladies. But this will stop you from collapsing and dehydrating, possibly the most important part of your well being.
3. Salt. When you are drinking water all the time, you need to bear in mind that you need much more salt to keep your body going. I recommend olives.
4. Hats & Scarfs, if you are in the sun. Cover your head or the sun will knock you down.
5. Be social, people will probebaly touch you and get to your uncomfort zone, but be prepared and non jumpy, even if you are a Finn with a huge personal space complex. Be active, you get so much more out of your time in Greece. Throw in a few “Kalimeras”, perhaps think about smiling sometimes – this will get you far. Greeks are really generous and welcoming people. Embrace the possibility to wake up from your Finnish social hybernation.
6. Realise that Greek red wine is much stronger than wine back home. There is probably going to be some Raki later, so keep in mind that your over heated body will get dizzy faster than back home as well. There is always a stronger Booze.
7. Early dinner is at 2200. After that, there is night clubbing. This is due to it being so much less hot during the night. Get your body sorted out with the late dinners and weird eating times in general.
8. Keep your Siesta for sleeping. There’s a reason why nothing happens in the afternoon – do not do it like me and schedule work on those slots. Just have a nap, or the ‘cover sleep’ to cover the 5hours lack of sleep you’ve gotten while staying up until 4am on the Beach. You’ll be feeling so much better at 6pm when it’s time to work again. The Greeks sleep in two phases: from 2am to 7am and 1pm to 5pm.
9. Air conditioning can also give you a sore throat or keep your cold going for a week.
10.Realise that your body is not used to Greece. It’s a full time job to just keep you going and manage your survival.

“You have now the choise: Either to Eat or to Drink tonight”, says our Greek guide, George.

We are off to Rythemnon old town for the night. Rethymnon is a city that has endured a lot of turmoil in its history. There’s an old town, but the old buildings are mostly destroyed in wars and earthquakes. Its religious background is both Christian and Muslim. There’s even a school from the 17th century which has had both Christian and Muslim girls and boys in it. The old town is like a labyrinth which has been a defence mechanism against many pirates and conquerors who get lost fast in the small alleys. Most buildings have had their own well inside, which made them self-sufficient enough to endure long lasting sieges.

Our tour around the old city includes a trip to a Greek balalaika shop where these instruments are presented to us by a Sylvester Stallone lookalike. Vespas are everywhere. Shops sell herbs, spices, fruit, shoes, jewelry and of course whatever tat the tourists buy. Next we look into some buildings once gorgeous, now mainly covered with graffiti. I keep photographing the higher parts, out of reach of the human messy hands. The night would not be complete unless a bird poos straight onto my camera… If that pigeon had a bird flu of somekind, odds are that yours truly has it now. The guide has reached luckily a small fountain, so I get to wash my hands at that very point. Did I mention that she has purple pangs?

The international crowd of teachers is getting weary of the tour, not because of lack in interest but lack in food. It is ten a clock at night and they’ve had lunch ten hours ago. I predicted the Mediterranean time of dinner so I had some salty crisps before the tour. I’m not at home if Mr. Cock Up asks… When we finally reach a beautiful garden with Lemon trees and lanterns, there’s a piraña attack on the food and raki. I’ve maybe never seen a huge plate of souvlakis disapear quite so fast.

I’ve been hanging out with a German girl and some guys from Liverpool, so when the bus leaves back to the hotel, we stay to enjoy the athmosphere. Rethymnon harbour is covered with tat sellers, the mandatory picture and caricature artists and even a guy who is selling the gayest lightsabers known to man – they are seriously rainbow colored. My friend Daniela doesn’t allow me to get one, even though after four rakis, it seems like a reasonably good idea. The Harbour has those traditional restaurants looking over the sea and we have some long island ice teas listening in on Azerbajzan’s entry of this year’s Eurovision song contenst. At the end we manage to stumble back to the hotel 2amish.This is capturing the real Greek way of living and schedule. Now if I would only manage to take breaks for sleeping in the afternoons– A Finn would say: “Kuolema kuittaa univelat” (Death will settle your sleeping debts)

El Greco is our hotel by the very Beach in Rethymnon, east from Chania. The hotel is four-five star and is designed to entertain their visitors, preferably so that they never leave the hotel on their trip. There is no need. The breakfast, lunch and dinner are served with fabulous variation of buffet Greek food. Lots of Greek salad to serve mummies, stakes and fries to serve daddys, macaroni and cheese to serve the kids and possibly 12 choises of pudding, including chocolate mousse, tiramisu, meloni, greek yogurt with honey – even its own ice cream cubing possibility. After browsing the salads, I find olives and feta. I know what I’ll be having for the whole week. It’s going to be both easy and hard to keep one’s diet in here – on the other hand, there’s good salad options, but then you are spoilt for choise with all the tastes around the huge area of food…

This is a holiday destination for many, but a work for me. I would probably never pay for this kind of place for a holiday – Even if swimming, eating and sunbathing might be someone’s dream, I’m a Finn with a milky white skin, all my skin does in the sun is burn. Therefore, and for reasons of interest, I would much rather climb mountain, shoot temples or statues with my camera or find some interesting people talk to. Even to sweat like a pig kicking high, rather than sitting in the sun. Don’t get me wrong, I love that work has sent me here for a week, I am lucky, because I get to be here as my job and I don’t have to choose it as a holiday. The sea is stunnigly beautiful in colors and I cannot remember the last time I swam in one.

The hotel has its own shop that sells pretty much everything, including make-up and german novels. I can see this is not a Finn-resort, they would never pay these prices. The cost of a room is 172/night and then there’s also food on top of that. There’s about 3-4 pools for what I have found so far and of course the sea is twenty metres away, so one can pretty much find their own spot and just stay there. Must be very nice for those with kids. Somehow, I still feel like in a prison. It’s too hot to go anywhere else, so I am stuck here. Also, there’s no wireless in the rooms – I am going to go and check if there’s wireless in the lobby though. But if not, El Greco for me is missing the one thing that I cannot work without… I am tempted to go for a swim, but decide to leave the bikinis in my suitcase for a couple of more hours, the non-sleeping last night has caused a real need for the siesta. Work begins again at 5pm. I plan to be ready.

You know how some hotels give you chocolate as the treat? This one has given me a bottle of white wine and a fruit basket. Could be worse. Looking for a little more carefully – white wine *and* red wine. I am wondering if my husband and I will some day have half Finns and say: fuck it, we want an easy life with pools, sea, sun and wine poured on to our room and just come down here… Who knows.

When the sun sets with glorous red dusk over the Mediterranean, I walk in the sea with my legs getting soaked. The unbearable hotness has slowed down by the cool air breeze and it’s the best time of Greece. Just at sundown, perfect light, sea’s voice is harsh, call of the poseidon, somehow feels like heaven for a second. It’s the same as with so many times in my life when travelling, I wish I were here with someone else. I once was in Samos with my dad. Sometimes you get only one chance like that. But that time might make all the difference. Because it at least happened and I was there. Life is so momentary and fading, he said to me. He might be dead, but goes on with me.

There’s a couple of ways to dealing with them: 1. Don’t book it. 2. If you absolutely cannot avoid them, then mp3 player and some booze might help. I sit at Helsinki-Vantaa airport at 5:30am waiting for an Air Finland flight to Chania. I can tell you now, that if I could have taken the Finnair option, I would have. Unfortunately this week, that would have meant that I would loose yet another day of being with my husband out of two months that we’ve had the pleasure of each other’s company for approximately four days. But also, I would have missed a day of a meeting that I am therefore, so Finnair was not exactly an option.

I can already tell that this flight is going to be hell. About half of the population can be called ‘kids’ of some sort. The other half is their alcoholic parents who have started drinking at 5am, or perhaps not stopped. There’s a fat Finnish lady with bicycle shorts and a poncho on top. She’s sipping her bubbly wine and I feel sorry for the 7 year old daughter who doesn’t seem to get a sandwich while the parents have a feast. There’s a family of four kids, not one or two but solid four with one of them being approximately one years old. I look at all of these families and wonder why on earth they thought it would be an idea to take all these kids to a resort that’s going be unbearably hot in October – and did I mention that it’s July. Suddenly flying to Chania through Budabest *and* Athens doesn’t sound like a bad option at all.

I’ve just read a great article about a very sensitive topic of having kids on planes. I am going to follow the propsed tactics of the article, and board as late as possible. This is not a two hour flight. From Helsinki within the reach of only two hours, you could get to the baltic countries or perhaps even Germany, but that’s it for the flights that the kids would take well. This flight is double the fun. One of the kids is already vommiting, and there’s still an hour to the takeoff.

At the end, the plane is huge with four individual aistles and I get a whole row of my own. prepared to the worst, but the trip is actually very pleasant. There’s a stupid bride film on television and nice breakfast, the toilets are located in the middle of the plane and have baby changing possibilities. This saves the lives of at least some parents. I sleep, eat and watch Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway fighting over a wedding venue. Could have been so much worse.

It’s good to know that everything that can go wrong, does not always go wrong.

I’m in a meeting in Bavarian house, in the middle of Brussels, five meters from the European parlament. Glass buildings are pretty impressive in general, tall, massive, the castles of the millennium. There’s a large variation of flagpoles outside, probably the full 27+1, but I don’t have time to count them. Brussels has a feeling of high-expressed political atmosphere, splashes of all Europeaness floats around in small street cafes which you need to walk through to get past the french and Flemish speaking business women with clout. Euro buys you anything, but the value of it is about the same as in back home, Finland: Expensive. Alcohol is cheaper, but that’s really not a surprise. Alcohol is cheaper anywhere outside Finland. Chocolates are everywhere. I would buy cheese if it wouldn’t be such a hot day – it would just melt and besides, I won’t have time to eat it as I’m due to be in Crete next week.

I work in EU funded eLearning projects, which take me around Europe almost every other month, sometimes more often. This is a great job as it means traveling and meeting new, interesting people and innovations. I am in Brussels for a kickoff meeting of ‘Open Science Resources’ which is a three year project that aims to create ways to include digital learning resources produced by Science Centers and museums into huge pan-European repository and therefore reach teachers and students around the 27 member countries.

I love European cities at warm evenings with cool breeze, blue skies and impressive buildings. The air is magical and the roads are covered with individually set stones. Small shops sell tourist crap but also sometimes interesting items and specially fresh fruits and flowers. You would not see this in Finland, because both would freeze to death in a second outside, so there’s never this kind of central European feeling back home.

However, it also gets aggressive on the streets at night and I find my martial arts training from last week coming in handy: I walk alert, no victim behavior, head high, no mp3-player armed with a 3-kilo camera and 1,5litres of Evian. I get some dodgy males shouting “Ca va?” to me, but no one really bothers me even if I am woman alone in heals and a dress after dark. This is an area near the metro station “Rogier”, which apparently has been known to be slightly questionable in the past. To prove that, in the morning at 8am, my colleague and I leave for the meeting and discover three hookers outside our hotel, really selling themselves as well. Who buys sex at 8am on Thursday mornings? Business men stuck in traffic perhaps?

It really doesn’t get anymore European than Brussels, I think. Who ever you come across on the streets, is cross-cultural, multilingual and dress-code free. you can hear which ever language and one should not assume that one speaks a language that no one else speaks. Behind me and my friends walk some Finns, complaining as usual, this time about how slow we walk, so they cannot get past us. I say to them “Kyllä, voimme siirtyä sivuun, olkaa hyvä vaan” (Yes, we can get out of your way, please pass in your hurry) And they feel as embarrassed as I have occasionally done. Somehow I get immediate pleasure on lowering their feeling of superiority – I know, I have cheap fun.

I meet some colleagues from another European project. We have an interesting analysis of human behavior in consortiums, how do people establish social interactions and politics all the wat. However, that’s clearly a long enough topic for another post because we keep ourselves entertained for five hours. There is also a carnival in the Grand Platz in the honor of Charles V. It’s called “The Entre” and quite an entrance it is: Perhaps a thousand people dressed in medieval costumes, carrying flags, riding horses, dancing and singing. There’s a huge barrel of beer and the pheasant dressed men and women are distributing it to the audience. There’s even a dragon and of course releasing some pigeons and firing thousands of paper pieces around the area. Kings of today might throw parties like this one, but I don’t see the population appreciating it to the extent of Europeans back then.

Brussels, however hot or dirty on the streets, still gets my favorable stamp. It has been young and old, new and traditional, memorable and surprising. I buy my overly prices bottle of water from the airport and wonder when I’ll be back.

So I have decided that since this blog is called the Finnworld – I will also talk about my other travels in the wonderful world that I live in. Today, I’m in Brussels. It’s 27 degrees celcius – let me tell you, that’s called ‘hot’ if you are a Finn. I live back home in a smallish city called Jyväskylä, which means that when ever I travel absolutely anywhere, I first have to go through Helsinki, the capital of Finland. Getting to Helsinki from Jyväskylä, you can take about four options, the car, the bus, the train the plane – normal variety. Today, I took the plane.

When taking connecting flights via Helsinki, Finnair is normally very good with being in schedule. No problems. They do have a tiny issue with luggage though, specially when connecting flights are too close to each other. So exactly like mine today. Note to self: Always have at least an hour in Helsinki – it might make the difference of washing your teeth at night. Note to self number two: Always wear sensible shoes in the plane and pack at least one bra to your hand luggage. Preferably a change of clothing entirely. This might make a difference of your meeting wardrobe in the following day. I am sure the consortium will have a field day tomorrow with me turning up in a tank top. But hey, it was warm in Finland as well.

I probably cope much better than many others to the sudden loss of luggage. Afterall, it’s just clothes and toiletries. The only thing that I cannot do without is suncream, and that I’m sure I can find somewhere in the capital of Europe at 8am. I suppose it’s even a weird sensation, being ‘alone’ in a new city with nothing but the clothes that I have on my back. Clothes are not that important to me anyways. I went a week in China with just hand luggage, I can easily do Brussels for three days in a summer skirt. Laptop is what I have much more longing for, or the internet connection. I can’t perform basic functions without my camera either – god knows how did I manage without it once.

Perhaps I get my luggage tomorrow, perhaps not. In any case, European capital looks like a new exciting city to explore. With loads of monuments and confusing combinations of street names. Who knew that “Laan” means “Boulevard”. In the middle of all the Flemish and French, which I can perhaps have some understanding of – The main language that I would have needed tonight was Greek. “You will take on some lessons, yes?” says my colleague, Sofoklies. And if I would be smart, that’s exactly the direction for my language learning right now with all the Greeks involved in all the European projects.

“Kippis”, I say to my two identical hunkie programmer colleagues from Crete, fixing my pashmina, which has saved me from the embarrashment for not wearing a bra on EU project dinner. Thank you, mother in law, for perhaps the best item in my travel wardrobe. You are never alone with a Pashmina.