Home sweet home!

Here I am, back at home where everybody around me are talking the language that I so perfectly understand,but which sounds so weird right now. I know I've heard finnish all the time while I was in Asia, but now when everybody's talking it everywhere I go, all the time it just feels so unreal.

My last days in Sydney and Singapore didn't go quite like I had planned. I got sick. Great! On my last day in Sydney I was way too weak to do anything but to look like one of those homeless who slept on a park bench...Trust me it's not too comfortable a place to sleep....Then on the way to Singapore, I got high fever. Not too much fun to fly when your freezing, you can't swallow or hear or talk and the kid who sits infront of you has decided to be the next big kickboxer and to practise all the way to Singapore so that flying attendants nearly threw him out of the plane. Then I just spent 2 days in Singapore under the covers on a couch feeling like I was in a freezer eventhough there was +29C (+84F) inside the apartment.

Well I managed to fly back to Finland and see a doctor and I'm finally feeling alive again. Well, Now that I'm home and have 4 monhs and pretty much nothing to do, if you have the same problem and you're bored, just feel free to fly here and come to say hi! I promise you'll have an authentic Finnish experience. My travels are over for a while (eventhough my friends just told me about these dirt cheap flights to Latvia as a one choice for a little summer trip they would want me to do with them) and I intend to enjoy this Finnish atmosphere which feels actually quite nice for a change. Hip Hip hurray for home!

But what happened to the kangaroos?

Jihaa ! Here I am in Sydney. After sitting 10 hours on Gulfair's plane (yeah, someone said I must be brave to fly with airline from Middle-East, but that actually was a great experience, good service and everything!) I was so ready to just get to our hostel. When we did arrive to our hostel, what did we see? 2 girls with a short thing that I guess you can call a skirt on, waiting for some customers to pass by. Nice! I must have picked the right neighbourhood when I made the reservation through internet. Oh well, my mom thought the whole thing was merely hilarious and just stated that at least we know what to do if we run out of money! Trust me, just my mom could say something like that, in a situation like this! I know some moms of my friends would have freaked out and wanted to go to a different place, but not my mom, she is way cool with things like these. Then we met our room mate who is actually working as a somekind of reseptionist for a adults agency...Great, so what could be the theme of our trip?

During the first day we were supposed to go and see the famous opera house, but we never got that far, cause we got stuck in a shoe sale!! Yes, typical women...But I really needed new shoes for my brother's wedding! Today, which is a second day here, we found our way to the opera house and we wook a ferry to Manly beach anjd just enjoyed of Australian lay back attitude and breathed in this fall air (Yes, we are down under and the summer is over here and turning into a fall...)

We haven't figured out tomorrow yet, but that's exactly what I'm about to do right now! But if I won't see a kangaroo soon, I'm starting to doubt am I really in Australia...

Here's just some pictures from my stay here in Singapore. I don't have much to write right now, it has been just raining for a week and we have been watching tv, that's it.

This is so typical picture of Singapore. In downtown there are lot of skycrapers and all the buildings are a bit different shaped, unlike in Finland where every building looks like a box... 

Singapore can be also very colourful. This picture is from Clarke quay where there are lots of restaurants and night spots. 

This is a first christian cemetery in Singapore. It might be a bit weird picture to put here (I mean who is interested about cemeteries...)but somehow I like it. 

Outi pretending to be a bambu bear... 

Here's a picture from Sentosa. We just love palm trees with Outi. Unfortunately everything is man made in Sentosa. Palm trees are brought here from who knows where, Sand is brought from Hawaii and even the stones are fake ones!! I mean how pathetic is when you have to have fake stones... 

"Twins" Outi and Annu, Milla and I going out (what a surprise...) 

On the way to ladies night. I have a bottle of traditional Finnish drink which is kind of like liquoricevodka. Thanks Milla for bringing that as a surprise! 

Our wide grins aren't the main point in this picture...It's the badges me and Outi's sister Anu have in our bags. What mine says? Warning I have an attitude and I'm not afraid to use it. Cool! What mine says? I smile because I've no idea what is going on. Sweet! 

Here's our lovely school. It's actually so big that there's only half of it in this picture... 

Class mates Claudia, Gayna,and Belinda. I do look like a blond when you compare to these girls, although I refuse to be one.  

This is one of our school's food courts. There's maybe 6 or 7 of these. You just order your food from the different booths and eat it outside while birds are flying over your head. 

Ben and Jerry rules!! We had some ice cream in the zoo and boy were we happy... 

Fantastic! Someone had left shoes just for me, maybe it wasn't Cinderella though... 

Yes, Milla thought that this poor guide definitely needed a hug!! 

Katja and I in a ladies night. What a team we were, we definitely had that Saturday night fever!! Even John Travolta would have been pale... 

About Singaporeans

Have I evet told you how I feel about Singaporeans? Well here it comes, whether you like it or not. They are the most naive people I've ever met. They haven't been anywhere and it can be real hard for them to understand that there's a totally different world out there compared to theirs. One of us told to her classmates that she had been engaged and lived with her boyfriend for 3 years. And guess what her classmates asked horrified, "You didn't kiss with him, did you!?" Then they have asked that "what happened to your eyebrows?" when one day my friend hadn't put make up on. Some muslims also asked from my friend that did she have big boobs because she ate pork and if they would eat it would they get bigger boobs!!

They are also very rude at times. They ask you personal questions and stare at you and they try to get into elevators and metros before people have been able to come out. They won't give their seats to older people in a bus and the most irritating thing is that they walk extremely slowly and stop in the middle of street with out a warning to think about something so that you'll bumb into them.

It's not like they all would be annoying, but somehow after my period here I don't think Asia is a place for me. This is a beautiful area, but there's too many people. I guess sometimes you just have to go far to start appreciating the things about your own home country. The first thing I'm gonna do when I get back to Finland is that I'll just eat for 24 hours, Finnish home food rules!!, jump into car and drive around to see all of my fantastic friends, go to sauna and just enjoy the fact that there's only 5 million people living in Finland scattered around the 6th largest country of Europe.

Done and over with!

My challenge is over. I read those 1024 pages of Gone with the wind in 5 days. Although I have to confess that I did have a one day brake, during which I read a book about Simon Cowell's life. Interesting guy, I must say and way too hated for his honest comments. So now I must figure out the next challenge. Hmm... How about going home? That'll be a challenge after being gone for a year again.

I thought to put some pictures here from Down town. Although this first one is not from there...This is our local grocery store from around the corner. Looks a bit different than yours, or...? 

This picture is from boat quay, and that river is "famous" Singapore river. That white, pale looking dude in front of the picture is Sir Stamford Raffles, the British founder of Singapore. 

This concert hall behind me lookes just like that smelly, crap tasting Durian fruit. Well, what can I say, Singaporeans just love their durians, lah! 

Here it is, Stamford hotel that used to be the tallest hotel in the world untill some hotel in Hong Kong droped it to the 2nd place. In top of that hotel there's that New Asia bar, that is the bar situated highest in the world... 

Here we are inside Stamford hotel in 70th floor going to New Asia bar. And doesn't Annu and Outi look kind of like twins? It could have something to do with those green shirts of them...(the next day, they both accidentally wore pink shirts and same kind of skirts...Outi though would say her shirt was coral colored not pink, but that's just a lame excuse...They are the twins what comes to clothes, no matter what they would say!) 

Annu and Outi (the twins...)in New Asia bar with drinks that tasted like mudslides and brought back good memories from last summer 

Been around the world...or then not

During my almost 23 years of existence in this world, I have been in 13 countries, seen 13 States of America and spent 2 years and 4 months outside Finland. And just like this wouldn't be enough in 2 weeks i'm boarding to a plane that'll take me to Australia to conquer yet another continent. The question is, will I ever get enough of travelling?

If you had told all the facts mentioned above to the girl I was 10 years ago, she would have laughed and said that you must have been mistaken and that wasn't her life. Oh well, that girl didn't really know much about the person she would turn out to be anyway. I always said that I would be the last one of my friends to move from home to live on her own, actually I was the first one in the age of 16. I was confident I would never ever quit my hobby of dancing, but eventually I did. And most of all, I never thought I would have the courage to leave everything familiar behind me and move to another country for a year. In 2001 that became reality and after that I've been ready to travel pretty much where ever, when ever.

All these things are coming in to my mind now that my studies here in Singapore are over and I'm supposed to return to that northern reality of Finland within 4 weeks. In the back of my mind, there's a question, What next?

She's so much like me...

I love challenges every now and then, they just spice up your life. My challenge at the moment isn't as spicy as the indian food here that you'll never learn to eat, but it has as many pages as Singapore's metro has Asians during the rush hour! 1024 pages of Gone with the wind is something I got to accomplish within 5 days!! (then my library card expires and I'm damned to be bored without any books for the rest of my stay) At the moment I'm in page 317 and already now driven Outi crazy by reading it a weird grin and smirk on my face, laughing aloud every now and then. But what can I say, when you find a character who is as stubborn, determined and even as selfish as you and you notice she is behaving in exactly the same way than you would in similar situations, You cannot do anything else than have a goofy smile on your face and realize how dumb you are...=)

Over and done with!

YES! The finals are over and everything went more than well. Except for the little fact that we were in a wrong classroom with Outi in the beginning of the first exam...UPS!=) But you know, we are just dumb exchange students who were following their classmates when instead we should have been reading a paper that was in our hand and said our classroom was 18 instead of 12...

I think the teachers had actually been reading my mind since they seemed to put all the questions that I knew the aswer for to the tests, or then maybe my week long marriage with the lecture notes wasn't such a bad idea and waste of time after all...Anycase no more school for me untill the end of August!!

Except I almost forgot, I've been planning to study Spanish, German and Swedish on my own during this summer so that I wouldn't be totally clueless when my classes starts again next semester. So most likely I'll turn out to be a German-Spanish murmuring handyman-painter, who storms around our little cottage all summer long fixing places and listening to music way too loud at the same time.

I know I'm not a Bob the Builder, but I do know the difference between hammer and shaw and that's a good start! And I'm so sure that this summer I won't get bored after painting just one wall, so I'll finish those 3 walls I was too lazy to paint like 2 summers ago ...=)