Kung Pao Liquorice and Coffee, please

I ventured to have a lunch in a local Chinese restaurant called Guangzhou Garden to keep the reverse home sickness at bay. Pretty authentic tasting dishes I would say, but I just gotta love the way the two food cultures integrate so seamlessly.

First of all there is a salad table (raastepöytä), which you would not expect to find in Asia. Not that I am complaining. I was actually often missing fresh side salads with the never ending supply of oil soaked noodles.

Secondly they naturally offered bread with the dishes. And not just any bread but proper crispbread (näkkileipä). Chinese restaurants in Singapore do obviously have pao on their menu, but that's not really the same thing as bread being an integral part of every single meal in Finland (and in all Nordic countries alike). By the way I could have added Liu Sha Bao to my list of things that I miss. As well as having a pao with Chilli crab.

Thirdly they offered coffee and candy as a desert. Serving coffee in Finland is just given, but once again coffee was not accompanied with just any candy but salty liquorice, which is a very Finnish concept and somewhat of an acquired taste. I am not much of a candyman myself, but I do remember enjoying lätkäliiga when I was a kid. (By the way, I just witnessed a massive injustice where lätkäliiga does not have its own Wikipedia entry! I trust that some proper candy aficionado attends to this immediately and makes the world a little bit of a better place).

Final relocation summary (Part 2 of 3) - What I will miss

This is the penultimate (one of the fancy new words I learned while working all the time in English) entry in this concluding series. Previously I listed things things that I achieved or ended up with after 24 months in Singapore.This time I will cover items...

What I will miss

• Fresh juice as promised (I did invest in a cool machine called a slow juicer so I can take some of that juicy goodness with me.)
• Never ending warmth. Eating outside while wearing shorts and flop flops year round. In Finland that is limited to odd number of days around July and August and that's pretty much it.
• True metropolitan city to live in (The concrete jungle of Central Business District blows me away every time I am taking a taxi through the downtown)
• Short distances to everywhere with no real traffic jams to speak of. Inexpensive taxis and well oiled public transportation could be added to this category.
• Excellent food starting from the succulent shrimps and extending to things like soup filled xiao long baos.
• Possibility to dip into the pool at any time of the day or year. (Now I will start hitting myself on why didn't I make it into a habit to do it everyday while I still could)

• Gym & tennis facilities in our back yard (see the above comment about the usage of pool). Also cost of having private coaches for both activities was temptingly low.
• Possibility to hop on a plane and get anywhere in South-East Asia in matter of few hours for typically a nominal price. If I feel like learning to surf I can do a quick weekend getaway to Bali or perhaps I would fancy outdoor rock climbing over Andaman sea in Krabi. There are 4 low cost airlines operating from Singapore so any of these quick trips do not even cost anything.
• Having a full time helper around. Now getting back used to walking up early just to fix  breakfast for the kids, getting them dressed (and re-dressed to survive the arctic weather), washing their teeth and taking them to school and walking the dog feels like a true chore on top of a normal work day...
• Effectively the full list of achievements could be also translated into what-will-I-miss statements. For example for the first time in my career in my current company I had a fixed desk and fixed set of colleagues, which was truly nice after having been the very definition of a mobile worker for 10+ years. 

 Once again there must be tons of other things to be missing, but these came to my head first.

The final installment in the series will deal with things that I do NOT miss.