Today marks the first day at the new school for my older child. This is probably one of the biggest practical changes for relocating families. After all I continue in the same company working more or less in the same business context and as an adult (really, am I?) I can work consciously to adapt to the new culture. But for my son it is a new country, new food, new language, new school, new friends, new teachers, new practicalities and all of that pouring over him on the first day. Then again kids possess this amazing ability to adapt into new settings and as a sponge to suck in all new influences.
With hindsight it proved to be a quite an excellent decision to have my son enroll into English speaking day care and later on to pre-school. So the language barrier will be so much lower to begin with, even if he was participating in a Finnish speaking school just before migrating over. But then again up until now there has always been either other kids or some teachers who have been able to assist him in Finnish when necessary.
Even if he doesn't admit it or even realize it himself, he is in for a treat of a lifetime. It will not only be English that he will be engulfed by. Him attending Canadian International School means that he will learn the basics of French and in addition he will have his first Mandarin lesson starting on Wednesday. Furthermore in the school there are kids representing almost 70 different nationalities currently. So it is going to be truly international learning experience to prepare him to be a real global citizen.
My little boy looked so brave albeit clearly anxious standing there in his brand new official red Physical Education uniform and wearing a Spider-Man backpack in the school yard this morning. Uniform wasn't at all the only thing that we needed to stock up for the new school. There are all kinds of fees attached: enrollment fee, confirmation fee, semester fee, facility fee... Coming from Finland the whole conception of privately run schools is quite foreign. They are clearly aiming to run a profitable business.
On a final note I went with my son to the school for an orientation visit last week Thursday. They mentioned that they will be assessing my son's performance in English over the course of next couple of weeks to determine whether he would need Extra English Lessons (for additional fee of course). As we were quickly visiting the ELL class in session, I learned from the teacher that the kids in there were just learning to tell stories using the F-words! Apparently she meant words like Fox, Fire, Five, Fix and so forth.
Monday 28 January 2013
Wednesday 16 January 2013
Individual among masses
I happened to possess very common first name. According to PRC (Finnish Population Register Center that is -- Not the PRC that Asians would expect) I have 56 426 namesakes, which is quite a lot when comparing to the total population of 5,4 million in Finland. Especially common the name has been for men born in 70s and 80s.
In my work context this commonness of my first name was emphasized due to disproportionate relationship between men and women in my line of nerdy work and also due to the fact that most of my colleagues have been born in notorious time frame mentioned above. This has resulted in more than every tenth colleague in my department being my namesake! I often joked that proper name must have been a recruitment criteria. Just before relocating, the final nail on the coffin of my identity crisis was realization that I supposedly had a doppelgänger portraying the role of Dr. Who from a particular season.
Fast forward to the Little Red Dot under the equator. Here I was awarded a completely new digital identity within the corporate systems and my Finnish identity was laid to rest for the duration of my assignment. In practice I received for example a new external email address. This new identity is in the form of firstname@company.sg -- no need to separate with last name as I am the only and actually the first of my kind working in this location!
I needed to come all the way here to find my long lost identity. I am currently the odd one out of my department. There is actually only one other European that I know of among my whole extend group of colleagues around. It is funny that for example the security guy in our office building occasionally walks around the floors and every single time he happily greets me with my first name. They really didn't do that in Finland, even though just by guessing they would have been correct every tenth time.
However I have found a new group of names I am being referred to. Occasionally when I have booked a taxi (there is a cool little taxi booking app, which actually shows the geographic location of the booked taxi once the booking has been confirmed), the driver looks at me funny and wants to verify that it really was me who booked the taxi. They all say that they were expecting a Japanese woman because of my first name...
In my work context this commonness of my first name was emphasized due to disproportionate relationship between men and women in my line of nerdy work and also due to the fact that most of my colleagues have been born in notorious time frame mentioned above. This has resulted in more than every tenth colleague in my department being my namesake! I often joked that proper name must have been a recruitment criteria. Just before relocating, the final nail on the coffin of my identity crisis was realization that I supposedly had a doppelgänger portraying the role of Dr. Who from a particular season.
Fast forward to the Little Red Dot under the equator. Here I was awarded a completely new digital identity within the corporate systems and my Finnish identity was laid to rest for the duration of my assignment. In practice I received for example a new external email address. This new identity is in the form of firstname@company.sg -- no need to separate with last name as I am the only and actually the first of my kind working in this location!
I needed to come all the way here to find my long lost identity. I am currently the odd one out of my department. There is actually only one other European that I know of among my whole extend group of colleagues around. It is funny that for example the security guy in our office building occasionally walks around the floors and every single time he happily greets me with my first name. They really didn't do that in Finland, even though just by guessing they would have been correct every tenth time.
However I have found a new group of names I am being referred to. Occasionally when I have booked a taxi (there is a cool little taxi booking app, which actually shows the geographic location of the booked taxi once the booking has been confirmed), the driver looks at me funny and wants to verify that it really was me who booked the taxi. They all say that they were expecting a Japanese woman because of my first name...
Wednesday 2 January 2013
Finnish cultural imperialism pt 2
Back home at SG and here I come across yet another weird example of globalization. I picked up the ice cream in the picture below from local 7-eleven downstairs to my office.
I truly have trouble understanding what sense does it make to ship ice cream from Finland to Singapore. Especially with very standard product by a global conglomerate. Then again it does keep any potentially dawning home sickness at bay.
PS. In case you are wondering (like me after rereading this entry after almost 2 years) why this is called part 2: here was the first sign of Finns taking over the world.
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