Outlandish

As I've said before I love seeing new places, meeting new people and learning about new cultures. But that requires moving from place A to place B, also known as traveling. And that I have learned to hate. I say learned because it really was like that to me: too many big travel disasters in too short a time and I am forever traumatized. Having been stuck in separate airports in the UK because of the worst snow storm in Europe in decades, because of a volcano having a little stomach ache causing the European airspace to be closed down for a week, because of too many clouds in the sky (in England, REALLY?!?!?), and also having been present in the only occasion ever when a bus between Rauma and Turku broke down and caused me to be two hours late from work (just to name a few) actually is bloody ridiculous, funny even. Just not so much to me...    The experience of being stuck during the 2010 snow storm just before Christmas actually still brings tears to my eyes. It...

I love traveling! Actually not the traveling part of it but seeing new places, meeting new people and learning about different cultures. I didn't quite appreciate how far Finland really is from everything until I "won the lottery" and moved here. Here I find myself in the middle of some of the greatest countries in Europe. Greatest especially in the traveling-sense. There was an article in one of the biggest newspapers in Finland about how for some people traveling doesn't broaden horizons whatsoever. In the article the main point were Israeli tourists who travel in packs and only visit Israeli restaurants in the destination. But the writer also mentioned Finns who travel all the way to Thailand only to hang out in Finnish pubs and restaurants eating meatballs and mashed potatoes every day. I can't work my mind around such behaviour at all. Lately I've come to realize that I fear things I've never been afraid of before. For instance, I u...

It's reality now, I am going! An official job offer was made and I accepted it and as a result got to do all kinds of onboarding tasks, background checks and preparations for moving to another country. I must say, even though there has been a lot of work to be done before my accepting of the offer has been properly verified, all the tasks have been useful and illuminating. I finally have a small idea of where I am going. There's still a lot to do when I get to Slovakia. Also, it's not just paperwork regarding the job and moving to Slovakia, but there is also a truck load of paperwork to be done for all kinds of Finnish authorities. But it is probably best to notify absolutely every place here where I live because you never know what can happen. So, after the background checks and such I got to the business of booking flights. It wasn't quite as easy as I originally thought. I ended up looking up every single European airline and went through all of them trying to find...