Guess Who Am I

People’s Republic of China turned 60 this week (1st of October) and the celebration included a parade. The following video presents it in compressed and in very nice way.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival. Bring the food and mooncakes, let the celebration start.

We went to have Chinese foot massage yesterday evening. It is amazing how much they will learn about you through your feet. I learned that my lifestyle isn’t proper, I would need exercise for my shoulders and drink more water daily. That is for the start.

I was able to guess that, the difficult part would be to do something about it. It is always easier to find out what is wrong than fix it.

Well, late in the Friday evening (midnight) I arrived back to Tampere. The return trip was going quite smoothly until Stockholm where we arrived late due to the strong headwind. And because Saturday was Finnish Independency Day, the last flights from Stockholm to Tampere were cancelled during the Friday and our only possibility was to fly to Copenhagen to catch the last flight to Tampere. Naturally the shortest way to Tampere isn’t always the shortest in real life.

In Copenhagen we found out that our plane was faulty and they were going to change it to another one. It added one additional hour to our waiting time. And even with that extra time they didn’t manage to load my luggage to the airplane so it was delayed and arrived to home only during Saturday evening.

Week in Chengdu was interesting, the weather was rather cold and almost feeling like a Winter. But it was really nice to be back in China again, enjoy Chinese food again and culture. The week was really busy full of work so there wasn’t enough time to see much but what I saw was very nice.

北京欢迎你 – Welcome to Beijing. If you have been in China during the Olympics (I have been told that this has been running in the tv already for past year) then you could have not been able to avoid this music video welcoming you to Beijing. Quite catchy isn’t it?

Here I am in Beijing. Guess what kind of surprise waited for me when I arrived to the luggage claim area? The carts were nicely positioned in a perfect row waiting for the passengers. Very nice service.

The next aircraft is already at the gate waiting for us. I am currently in Frankfurt after two flights and next airport will be Beijing.

I am traveling to China again after staying in Finland already for two months. This time it will be a special trip because we are celebrating our wedding there.

So, everything starts with small steps, this trip with small Cimber airplane. Other updates from Tampere-Pirkkala airport are that the roadwork is still going on in nearby highway making sure you need to be extra careful reading those signs, I almost missed an exit while driving here. And security check was extra difficult today.

Fangfang received her residency permit yesterday. That was actually surprisingly fast process, only three and half weeks where the most of the time was spent while waiting the papers to arrive to Finland or consulate to finish the paperwork before sending the papers to Immigration Service office in Finland. After the Immigration Service office received the papers, they proceeded with the decision in one week. All of this is in my opinion just amazing and I wouldn’t have thought that government would be so efficient.

I guess all it requires is that you see how the government works to proof you to believe that your tax money is well spent. So far I am quite amazed how well Finnish Embassy and Consulates work in China and also how efficient our Immigration Service is. Good to say that I am a proud tax payer now.

Next step will be the actual move to Finland, which is going to happen in August.