Outlandish

Finally my trainee period of 4 months has ended and I am officially a Project Manager. A title I’ve been aiming for ever since I entered University. Why I aimed for that particularly? Because a project is a completely open concept, it can be anything and there are usually many of them at the same time, which means it’s a perfect job for me, because I don’t want every day to be the same and, most importantly, I want to be in charge :D And since I am now officially an employee I am entitled to use the holidays that have gathered up so far. And what would be a better way to waste my one week’s worth of holidays than fly to Central Europe to see some of my favourite people and places! But before that I am traveling first to Turku to see friends and family, since there’s no need for me to be in the office when I can work from wherever. Ok, I might have organized things so that I wouldn’t have to be in the office in June and scheduled all new trainees to arrive in J...

Since I was very young I thought that I didn't want to grow up to live the kind of life that my parents did: wake up, go to work, come home, eat, watch telly, sleep and repeat every day. Of course one cannot escape a job five days a week if one wants to live a reasonable life, but the time outside the working hours was in my case dedicated to everything except finding a husband, getting a family and being stuck with a mortgage. I promised myself my future would be different. And I've kept that promise to myself. I've loved living abroad, life like that is so exciting and full of unpredictable events. Comparing that to a stable family life in a country I never felt comfortable in seems like there's no other option anyway. I can honestly say that I have loved every day of my life when I've lived abroad (excluding London perhaps). But for the past few years I've come to think whether I will ever stop. Will I ever find a country where I want to stay for a...

Another position in my pocket, this time the one I've been reaching for for many, many years; project manager! Ooh it's good to be me :) And being a new citizen in another country once again I had to get all the paper work done. So, one evening I decided to take care of the registering. Unlike in Bratislava, here the registration office is in the city centre and people speak English.   That doesn't mean, though, that things would go smoothly for me: I found the correct street alright but stepped into a building way too early. I marched to the receptionist and announced in my unFinnishly loud voice that "I'm here to register!" Everybody in the lobby went quiet, the poor receptionist even looked a bit frightened. She mumbled something which I didn't hear and so I kept telling that I just moved from Finland blabla blablabla. She looked so embarrassed (for me perhaps?) when she finally managed to say in a teeny tiny voice "This is a theate...

  For a change my flight through Oslo went without hiccoughs and I arrived in Bratislava tired but excited. It is only my 3rd day here but I have already managed to empty the local Ikea, gotten a Slovak phone number and internet connection to my phone and also opened a bank account. Although I must mention, none of these things probably wouldn't have happened yet if I hadn't had a lot of help here! There's a saying 'Home is where your heart is'. I've always thought I left a chunk of my heart to Brighton when I was there at the age of 15. And obviously a big part will always reside in Finland. But basically I feel at home anywhere where I have a comfortable bed. That's why picking up bed linen was my first priority on Sunday morning. On Monday I turned a brand new page in my life and signed my first ever permanent work agreement with Dell s.r.o. The thing that, for some reason, especially thrills me is that after a year I will be able to ha...