Guess Who Am I

The year is soon going to change in Finland, this year I am spending the New Year’s Eve at home and not somewhere else like last year. The weather is not actually at the moment very good, it is raining in the southern Finland but not too much in Tampere though. We still do not have any snow so the year 2007 will start quite unlike before. I cannot remember when we have had a new year starting without snow but I guess there have been similar years already earlier.

Happy New Year to every friend of mine, to my family and everyone who reads this blog. Let the year 2007 become the best year so far and make your dreams come true.

The earthquake yesterday in Taiwan has apparently damaged the fiber optic cables between China and the USA and therefore damaged the Internet connectivity between China and the rest of the world. At least it is very difficult to access MSN Messenger and other US based services.

I was wondering why I didn’t see Xinyue online today and why there wasn’t response for the text messages. I was missing her and then I found out the reason in one of the blogs I read regularly, in the post 24 Hours Internet without U.S.. This just shows us how fragile our Internet world is sometimes – suddenly you will be without a connection and you have to start figuring out how to communicate. And according to my experience, there seems to be problems also when trying to call landline or mobile phone numbers in China. Maybe all existing cables are heavily utilised.

This reminds me about the time when I was still studying and the fiber optic cable used by academic universities broke down between Europe and the USA. We had to rely on the backup cable, which wasn’t so fast at all and suddenly you didn’t feel like accessing too much American sites any longer. Well, it got fixed eventually and I forgot the whole problem. Until now.

Let’s hope they can get those cables fixed as soon as possible.

Edit: at least CNN and AP are reporting about this in their news sites.

Merry Christmas to all of my friends and anyone who reads this blog. Hopefully someone has a white Christmas as we didn’t get one for this year.

Christmas is almost here – only few days to go still. Office is getting quieter and quieter all the time and people are leaving for a well earned holiday.

We got some snow briefly but it is now almost melted away so we will not see any kind of white Christmas this year. The weather forecast is promising something like +5 Celsius degrees (41 Fahrenheit degrees) for the weekend and we certainly have a different Christmas this year. The winter has really started very slow but let’s see when it actually gets started.

I am going to fly onboard one of the Finnair’s new Embraer planes. Nice to test a new plane

Aero will take me to Helsinki. A short hop in the air and we will be landing quite soon after the takeoff.

It is 7:30am and still completely dark while driving to Helsinki. Some snow would help to give us some light; hopefully there will be some snow at least for Christmas. All the snow we received melted away and we are currently experiencing some unusually warm weather. Well, I am born in November so I am used to darkness; there is something very calming in the total darkness like this.

The local dance school was promoting the upcoming dance competition and at the same time they were giving few dance shows to the audience in the local mall.

It seems that pretty much everyone these days is talking about globalisation, whether it is a good or a bad thing. I myself actually think that it is the direction where we are going all the time. The world is becoming smaller and smaller. Every year you learn more about the world you haven’t known before and nowadays it seems that everyone knows someone on the other side of the world.

Globalisation also changes our view of the world – some of the people are afraid of change and some are just seeing the benefits. I am seeing it as a good change opening new possibilities and I have been watching how my industry has also been taking the steps in this field. At the same time globalisation has allowed us to start understanding the world in better way – not just financially but also from cultural point of view.

As some of you already know, my life has changed a little bit since last Spring. I magically came across with someone who shares the same kind of open mind with me. Who is not afraid to jump into the unknown and is not afraid to learning new and getting to know someone living on the other side of the globe. It is quite amazing to see how small world we are living in after all – suddenly you know someone from the other side of the world.

What you get when you combine two different cultures, distance, different experiences in life and love? You get something amazing and beautiful of course. I have always thought that there isn’t one side in anything – you need to combine several sides of the story to understand anything. That is the reason why combining two different cultures is actually very interesting. I have now been studying a small portion of Chinese culture and I still do not understand much. Everyday I encounter something new and it requires me to study it further to understand. Life is continuos learning.

Distance is a little bit of a challenge; of course travelling is fun and I still love aircrafts – even after I have had so bad luck with me. There is a time difference between Finland and China, which causes that you cannot always communicate very efficiently. Both of us are working hard and especially for me this Autumn has been challenging at the office (so stuff happening). But it is part of this phase now, everything will stabilise in the future.