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.

Ship ahoy!

Through the turbulent oceans and horrible sea monsters my earthly belonings have just landed into the port of Helsinki. 1 full month ahead of the original pessimistic schedule. I finally get to sleep in my own bed next week! \o/

Final relocation summary (part 1 of 3) - List of accomplishments

This is the first of the 3 part blog series listing final summary of the 2 year excursion. First entry lists all the new skills and achievements I ended up with. The second installment into the series discusses about things that I am missing from Singapore. Final topic (potentially the very last entry into this blog altogether (snif)) will be about things that I do NOT miss.  

Achievements / trophies / outcomes 

• 3 ice cream bar mayorships and level 5 mall rat badge in Foursquare (I had to list the most cherished achievement first. I'll have serious trouble making sure I stay on the top in the upcoming months/years -- Actually I think I can. Foursquare did totally stupid update into their previously cool app and removed this gamification aspect completely.)

• Plenty of gained experiences from living and working abroad. Working in a massive conglomerate, working abroad was not so big of a shock. The corporate culture actually runs much deeper than working differences of various nationalities. Having worked in a truly global role with worldwide visibility makes it so much harder to get used to regional level business after this. 
• A great group of colleagues to have worked with. A few new true friends in addition. 

• Further improved English skills (I remember in the beginning it was half scary to find myself thinking in English during weekend).

• Enough vitamin D to survive couple of dark Finnish winters.

• New color into the map of visited countries: Philippines, Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia (and Ireland). Also number of revisits to countries I had been to before, but more stamps into the passport: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and US. Number of the countries visited as of today: 45.

• Some money left over from very friendly taxation percentage

Also gained new ability to stick to shadows to avoid
scorching sun. In the picture there is still the best place available
to wait for the pedestrian light to change.
This skill will surely come in demand in Finland!

• Two amazing kids who have had their first true dip into global world and understanding how very similar yet fascinatingly different we all are over the various country borders. Both of them speak fluent English and some Mandarin to top that off. Both of them have learned to swim there as well.

• 80 odd blog posts documenting the course of past 2 years for 3000+ page views globally.

• 100+ kilometers of running away from Zombie hordes in this cool augmented reality app. For the record though: I never acclimatized properly to be comfortably running outside during day time. 

• Successfully completing one of the sixweeks.com projects (200 situps done, 20 pullups &  100 push-ups still to come!) 

• 2 playlists of commuting music. One list for each year.

• Full set of furniture which unfortunately ended up being needed after the home coming. My earthly goods are floating somewhere in the Suez channel at the time of writing this.  
 

• Learned little bit more than just basics of tennis. I can occasionally hit one mean forehand. 

• Mastered the skill of chitchatting about weather when the only real change is whether it is very hot or really hot (once again I remember that in the beginning the very first weather related discussion made no sense whatsoever to me). 

• 926 PowerPoint files and 745 Excel files on my laptop hard disk drive. Honestly (perhaps unfortunately) majority of these are created by me! All these files got deleted during standard disk wipe on my last day at the office. Perhaps I need to clarify that I practice pretty nihilistic version control system, which leaves a wake of copies of the same file.
  
  
• Life long immunity to one specific serotype of dengue fever.

There are most probably several other achievements, which I don't remember right now. Thus perhaps these are the most important ones. (EDIT: OK, just a few more additions to the list)

Reverse culture shock

Surreal. That's the feeling when I am once again walking the dog around the same neighbourhood I have been living in since 2001 (with the exception of the Singapore getaway). Everything is pretty much the same with only superficial changes. Same shops, same restaurants, same schools, same kindergartens, same parks. Same cold, wet weather. As if I never left. I was away only for 2 years, but it is pretty amazing this dreamlike quality when  thinking about past 24 months.

Here are some of the quick observations from the first days before I end up not noticing them anymore:

On the very first day I encountered what could probably only be labeled as an old hobo, who seemed to have peed all over himself just a little bit. He was looking for a fight near the subway station. Luckily not with me. This was around 10 o'clock in the morning. Suffice to say you would never ever see a sight like that in Singapore. I wonder if quick corrective caning would decrease (or perhaps only further increase) the aggressive behaviour over here? The hobo was dressed in black. Like practically everybody else. Perhaps few people have dark gray jacket on. Or dark brown if they are very expressive.

My phone (new OnePlus One!) was struggling to hang on to LTE-network, but was dropping to 3G (!) speeds in the suburbs of Töölö, which could still be considered to be part of downtown Helsinki. This feels quite out of place coming from a area with complete countrywide (albeit miniscule country at that) coverage for full LTE speeds. Apparently I was almost the only one enjoying my 3G connection in the bus. I remember wondering few months ago if 80% of my fellow HKIers would be fiddling their phones in public transports by now.

Was it always like this: only old, ugly and dirty cars on streets? Where are the occasional Lambos, Ferraris and Maseratis? Then again I did get my first Tesla sighting in the streets of Helsinki! Of course I could easily get a ride with one of those German made cars for a fee. I was planning to take my kids to nearby National Park of Nuuksio to marvel the Autumn colours, but the trip would have costed me 70 euros -- each way. I guess we can enjoy the absolutely beautiful display of nature in the city parks just as well.

While on the topic of cost of living, I happily renewed my electricity contract for about 200 euros for the whole year. Also 20 euros a month for a mobile phone subscription with limitless calls and txts and 50 gigs of LTE traffic sounds inexpensive to me (as long as LTE works). Finally home broadband for 350 Mbps connection which costs 20 euros a month is truly a bargain anywhere.

Finally, I am afraid Singapore has ruined my taste buds beyond repair. Japanese food tasted bland. Nepalese wasn't really spicy even with warning texts on the menu. Not to mention eating home cooked family dinner. I solved the immediate concern with a bottle of chilli sauce as my hidden weapon. Now I only regret that I didn't purchase that special chilli sauce from Katong Laksa. However, I am compelled to add that I had truly spectacular sautéed wild boar (*) as part of the Autumn game menu in a local restaurant.

Welcome back me!

PS. For all you Finnish speakers out there there was a similar list of findings shared when Shanghai correspondent of the local newspaper returned back home.

(*) Mission accomplished!

All good things...(reprise)

(meta comment: Blogger ended up eating my original blog entry that I wrote at Changi airport with the very blood of my heart. This text is obviously but a shadow of the sheer brilliance of the original entry. Luckily SwiftKey has saved some full sentences as long as I remember the beginnings.)

My Earthly goods are currently traveling somewhere in middle of the Indian Ocean and I'm sitting one final time at Changi airport terminal 1 waiting for the gate to open for boarding. During the past two weeks of packing, shipping, fixing, cleaning, farewelling and panicky tennis lessons I have kept asking myself the same question over and over again. Why on earth would I of my free will (or anybody else for that matter) want to go back to live in a country which is cold and gloomy 6 months a year? It comes as no surprise to the avid readers of this blog that I have utterly enjoyed living in this little red dot under the equator.

Every time I ponder upon this question I end up concluding two best reasons ever: One reason is 8 years old and the other one is 3 at the moment. I could have easily extended my Singapore adventure, but the family opted going back as per the original 2 year plan. I would never want to miss a single day of the life of my wonderful kids growing up and thus the decision making was painless in the end.

Even though the feeling of letting go weighs so very heavily on my shoulders right now, I was told that it's good to leave when you are still having fun. At least it makes me so much more anxious to be planning for another similar excursion in the future.

Ended up hurting my back pretty bad as I took a little tumble when playing for one more time in the outdoor courts under the sun. Also ended up hitting my own nose with that new Babolat racket sticking from my back bag. So perhaps it is time for me to go back.

Farewell to Farewells

I truly feel that I have been a valued member of the work community. Today marked the final set of  farewell parties. Thus the total breakdown of various farewell parties is as follows:

• One more formal farewell event with cake and cards and everything
• Two after work beer events
• Two separate dinners arranged by different sets of colleagues
• Three separate farewell lunches once again with separate colleagues both within and outside my own department
• Two ad hoc farewell coffee sessions 
• One farewell ice cream session

Now, if for whatever reason I was not allowed to leave the country tonight at the airport (bear in mind that I had to return my Employment Pass back to Ministry of Manpower earlier today and officially I'm no more a legal alien),  I would not dare to show my face in the office tomorrow. I would probably just hide somewhere, change my instant messenger location to Finland and work from 2 PM to 10 pm just to fool everybody.

UPDATE: I did actually also throw so called house-colding party for few selected colleagues to help me get rid of beer and souvenir vodka, which my company did not agree to ship in a container for some reason.