Here we are at Mandy's place during chinese new year. We are eating a dish called steamboat dinner. You have a lot of raw stuff (like chicken, beef, calamari, fish balls, mushrooms...) and you just throw it in the pot and wait it to be cooked.  

Okey, now your task is to find everything you put in the pot, without taking someone elses food...And of course with the chopsticks!! 

Here they are, those damned dragon dancers with their drums!!(okey, lah. You can't see the drums in the picture, but trust me, they're there...) Would you like to have pants as stylish as theirs? WOW what a colour... 

Can you guess where we are going with our lovely sign? Well, we had a guest coming and we had an important job of picking her up from the airport... 

The girl is back in the picture!! Prudence dear is here in Singapore and the fun is about to begin! Hey, who crowned you as a queen...?

Can you show your tong? Well these girls can! Prudence brought us some Taiwanese cookies which name was cow tongs!! And here they are...(yeah,yeah, I know, don't play with the food...)  

Guess who's in town!?

Yes that’s true, Miss Prudence from Taiwan jumped on the plane and flew to hang around with us!! I couldn’t believe my eyes, when the little girl from last summer who left Block Island with like 2 huge suitcases and 3 extra bags, arrived here with a smaller bag than I had when we went to Kuala Lumpur for a weekend! Where will she put everything she will shop from here?!

It has been SOOOO great to see Prudence! I mean she is an Asian, but I can actually understand everything that comes out of her mouth!! Why can’t they all speak like that!? Life would be so much easier that way…She will stay here for 5 days and the day after she leaves Milla comes here!! YIPPII!! I just wish Milla had come a day earlier, then we would have had a reunion of room 17, that consisted of 4 girls that shared their lives for a little while last summer in a place called Block Island…Oh dear, when we have talked about last summer, I have started to miss those times so much. It’s weird how you forget the bad parts so fast and only the good things stays in the back of your brains…

Couple of girls from our project group started today by picking up their suspended student cards from office. And why were they suspended? (is suspension of student card supposed to be a punishment? Are you kidding me, it just means that u can’t borrow school books from the library!!) Well these girls had been shameless teenagers, without any moral values and they had walked in the premises of our holy school with TOO SHORT SKIRTS!! Hello!! Everybody does that here. Every other girl that passes you has a short skirt and high heels…So what’s new? I guess some teacher had just had a bad day when he took the student cards away…

Now I know why stars never trust reporters. Reporters never tell the truth, they get the facts wrong or then they just totally hear what ever they want to hear during the interview. Mr. Wan Chang Chin who interviewed us for school magazine because of our tsunami experience, brought me today the brand new copy of the magazine with our story in it, and the picture I took of the “wave” was nicely in the front page. Well the headline was tragic She came, she saw, she fled!! Sounds like I would have been some kind of action hero in Sylvester Stallone’s new movie…. During the interview I told him 10 times that we stayed in Karon beach (Yes I spelled it to him and saw how he wrote it down to his notebook) where things weren’t that bad, and that it was the Patong beach that was totally destroyed!. I guess he thought that was too lame since he starts the report by telling how I was in Patong beach. But then on the other hand he didn’t want to believe in my ability to measure things cause he writes “…the water rushed up to her ankles even though she had ran 5 steps up a flight of stairs…” Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a big difference between ankles and thighs, to where the water actually came up to. Then he is quoting me in big letters “It all happened so fast. Many what-ifs’ came to my mind.” Yeah, that does sounds the same than when I said that my head was totally empty and I didn’t have any time to think about anything!! Well what can I say, he will be a great journalist one day without a doubt! Maybe I should end this part by writing here my favourite part of the article: She lived to tell the tale. Well at least that’s true!

Going aroud the world..

I must be out of my mind, am I going crazy…I’m in a school where I wanted, I’m gonna have an apartment again when the school starts in fall, and in a couple of years I would graduate. So everything is quite perfect. But now I’m seriously thinking about taking the year off and going to Australia to be an au pair again!! Didn’t I swear after leaving St.Louis that no matter how great an experience it was I wouldn’t do it again? And still here I am, convincing myself that I could do it. So how did this all start, let me tell you. I was going through adds of summer jobs and there it was, half Finnish family looking for an au pair to take care of 2 boys in Australia. I have always wanted to go “down under” and this would be the way to do it for free. Family would pay your flights, your accommodation and meals. But then, what do I know about taking care of 2 year old kid!? And when I would go back to school my friends would graduate in half a year and I would still have 2,5 years left. Plus I’m supposed to fly back to Finland 25th of April and this job would start in April, which would mean I would be in Finland only couple of days…This urge to travel is becoming dangerous…I guess Finland really isn’t the place for me or then I just take it for granted and can’t really see the beauty of it.

Happy chinese new year and valentine's day too!!

Traditions, ah I just love them, just like I love to wake up to a new morning. Oh, wait what if we would combine these two, what would we get!? Well, let me tell you that we would get 15 days of drumming that conveniently starts when the sun comes up and you’re still comfortably under covers dreaming of something nice that most definitely doesn’t include drums! So why the drumming? Simply cause it’s Chinese new year and dragon dancers with their group of drummers like to hang out in our neighbourhood trying to scare away bad and evil spirits with their lovely sounds from their drums…I’m sure if I would be a bad spirit I would get the heck out of here.

So it’s time for the new lunar year, which this time happens to be a year of rooster. Outi and I have done some traditional things that are essential part of Chinese new year. We visited Mandy (one of my classmates) and exchanged mandarin oranges. I told you earlier how there’s nothing else in the stores that tons of oranges, and this is the reason. When you visit a family you give them 2 oranges (2 cause even numbers bring good luck. Come to think of it, that’s probably why I just bought 2 pairs of shoes that were exactly alike but just different colours. Without a doubt, that must bring me lots of good luck!!!) then you get 2 oranges back. Okey, I know, now your little grey, confused brain cells are wondering what’s the point of giving 2 oranges when you get back 2 oranges. Well dude, it brings you good luck, without which you cannot survive these days in this cruel, cruel world. And well, if you’re not married (one more reason why not to get married and take that nagging husband that eventually just ends up laying on your couch with a bottle of beer asking where’s his dinner…) you get a small red envelope containing money!!! The sum is not exactly the same than in a weekly lottery and you don’t spend a week in Bahamas with that amount, but hey, It’s FREE money (and a really nice idea and thought anyway. We singles are such a poor creatures…) And why is the envelope red? You guessed it, that colour brings you good luck. (just like little red sport cars…) So what if you have found that so assumed Mr.Right, and committed yourself to be his house slave for the rest of your life? Too bad for you, you just have to start giving out your money in those red little packages to every single friend or relative of yours that shows up in your house with oranges in her hand…

We visited Mandy couple of days ago and today was time for another visit. We were invited to have a lunch (gosh, that sounds like we would be some high-ranking people, who just drives around in limousines and gets invitations to all kind of parties…I wish that would be the case…) with one Chinese couple at their home. (There were also some Chinese exchange students, but you barely noticed them since they were sitting quiet throughout the whole lunch! You can guess that the case wasn’t the same with us…) So we went there prepared with 2 oranges, got our red little packages containing money, and surrendered ourselves into the wonderful world of Chinese delicacies. Oh well, delicacies or not, but I don’t prefer things that taste like fish food or potato flour! But you know, you gotta stay cool and act like everything you put into your mouth is the best thing you’ve ever had. Just don’t make the mistake of trying it twice! And then we did something that SURPRISINGLY is supposed to bring us a thing called good luck! We had a Singaporean fish salad that has like billion of ingredients in it and we all had to stick our chopsticks in it and mix up everything by lifting the ingredients in the air with our chopsticks. The higher the better, cause then you would get even more good luck! So there we were, 11 persons lifting salad up in the air with our chopsticks faster and faster, higher and higher until it seemed like most of the salad was on the table and not in the bowl! Well this must mean that I will be one hell of a lucky girl this year!

Outi was so thrilled today at the grocery store. (you should have seen her…) She found some Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie ice cream from the freezer! (like some of you know, we made a little pilgrimage to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory to Vermont during our road trip. We just had to do that after spending half of our wages in Block Island to that heavenly stuff called ice cream…) And now she is sitting on our sofa staring at her cup doing a hard job digging into her ice cream with the spoon and guess what, she can’t found any pieces of brownies in it!! She is totally crushed. What! No pieces of brownies?! They are cheating us! Chocolate fudge brownie with out brownie is like a Christmas without santa claus or beer without alcohol! This is a tragedy…What has happened to the world?

Oh and by the way, even though you won’t be receiving too many e-mails from me (because of this wonderful informational system called web blog…after which I don’t have much to write about for everybody personally) it still doesn’t mean you couldn’t fill up my mailbox with your e-mails!!

And the last but not the least Happy valentine’s day for all of my wonderful friends around the world!!! You are the best without a doubt.

I miss...

It’s weir how you start missing some things from your past. From my au pair year in St. louis I miss fire flies!! I can’t quite describe why those blinking creatures fascinate me…Maybe I’m secretly a bug person. From my summer in Block Island I miss martini nights. Even though that horrible guitar man was always there to make sure you couldn’t enjoy the music without being drunk, (maybe that guitar man was there on purpose to boost their alcohol sales…) it was still unforgettable! From the road trip we made with the girls in New England, I miss pretty much everything; even sleeping in that car and that spaghetti and meatballs we ate cold from the can!! I can guarantee that wasn’t the last road trip I will make on that continent! There’s just something about reading the map at the same time while driving a car (not such a great idea, right Milla and Outi?) and finding the Wal-Mart for the first thing in the morning to brush your teeth. You should really try it; it makes you feel so alive!!

So what will I miss from Singapore once I fly back to cold reality that waits me in a country called Finland. This is such an easy question! I will miss living with Katja!! She is such a cool person that it is impossible not to like her!!! She’s funny, can burn a hole in the dance floor while grooving the night away with you, and she has the greatest personality ever.

I’m wondering, how much noodles one can eat before her brains turn into that very same stuff. I know I was famous for eating that particular treat last summer in BI. People probably thought “look there goes the girl who has to have one pack of noodles a day!!” but now that I have to open that noodle pack for dinner around 5 days a week, that stuff is coming out of my ears and I am thinking about rewarding Columbus for sailing to Americas and bringing potato, the best thing in a world, to Europe and to our everyday meals. I mean you can eat potato baked, cooked, fried (list goes on and on) but noodles are always the same stringy piece of “macaroni”!

There it is, IKEA and looks just like everywhere else in the world. For once I can say that thank you Sweden. (ikea is a swedish company...) 

Sunday in Singapore

We started today with Katja by deciding to go to pool and spend the day there. When we got there, guess what they had done!? They had closed it because of the canoe polo team was practising!! Well since we had sunscreen on and everything, we just turned our backs to pool and instead went to school’s lawn to bathe in the sun in our bikinis. There we were, me by the tree and Katja in top of the ant nest (she noticed to move when those little devils were running all over her…) waiting for the guards to come and arrest us of immoral and seductive appearance…

I have done something historical today!! I walked out of Ikea (huge furniture and home accessory store) without buying anything! (Something I’m unable to do in Finland. Katja was actually laughing at me when we walked in the store and I just kept pointing her, that hey look there’s my carpet and my painting and my drawer and….) And the second historical thing is that I have eaten Fish!!! Okey I have tried fish before, haven’t liked it though, but this time I bought it myself!! I know that after seeing Finding Nemo I have had a motto that fish are friend not food, but I guess I have to forget that now…

They actually sold Swedish food in Ikea (so I actually didn’t walk out from there without buying something since I bought food, damn…) and I was quite angry at them that they told it all was Swedish even though most of it was made in Finland and had Finnish text in them!!! Any case I bought some crispbread (every kid eats it in school from the first grade on…and guys have to tolerate it in the army…), marinated salmon, lingonberry juice and Finnish candy. It felt like being in heaven when I ate those couple of minutes ago.

So what else have I done today? Let me see, taken 3 showers (who said that it’s hot in here…It’s not. It’s damn hot!) Read from Cosmopolitan about an Australian high class call girl who makes US $700 per hour, and studied my Amadeus ticketing manual (Amadeus is the global distribution system that most of the travel agencies use, basically boring computer stuff...) and learned what it means when I write the next code in my computer while using Amadeus. And ladies and gentlemen the code is:

FQPSIN/ASQ/CY/D20FEBKUL/AMH/CJ/D22FEBLHR--CDG/AAF/CJ/D04MARSIN/ASQ/CY/D06MARKUL

So did you enjoy learning it as much as I did? =) It just basically means that you are flying from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and from there to London then go somehow from London to Paris and fly from there to Kuala Lumpur via Singapore in specific dates in a certain class with a certain airlines…Nice and easy, ha?

Chinese New Year and something else

We had a guest lecturer on Friday and during that lecture I realised what my goal is for the next 20 years! One day I will fly in Emirate’s first class to Dubai and spend a week in Emirate’s own desert resort Al Maha. So now you think what’s so special about Emirate’s first class. Well they have a private suite for each passenger with a seat that is an armchair that turns into a flat bed. Of course it would be boring if it would be only a chair, so it also gives you a massage! You have your own minibar and you can request the drinks there before your flight. Your entertainment communication system includes 100 movies, 50 tv channels and 350 radio and music channels!! I mean is this a hotel or an aeroplane!? Hmm…Should I try to apply to work for Emirates?

Have you ever caught yourself from thinking about the same thing over and over again? For a couple of months (actually almost for half a year) I have noticed how my thoughts are going in circles. Some things are just so hard to let go…

“We have noticed some terrible things in our school. Some people are slipping from our dress code!! Thus you all have 2 weeks to correct following things: hair colour has to be natural, read, blue or green hair is not allowed. Guys your hair can’t be longer that up to your second collar, if they are CUT! After 2 weeks everyone who has something mentioned, aren’t allowed to attend classes. Ang girls even though lowcut jeans are nice, you shouldn’t wear them at school, when you sit they may show something that shouldn’t be shown and that is too seductive!” This is what we heard last week. Well I’m not in trouble since I haven’t coloured my hair lately to green to look like some bush, and if I wear lowcut jeans I do know how to sit with them and not to be seductive.

There’s one thing you inevitably run into in Asia. There are people everywhere and they seem to multiply in front of your eyes! Where ever you go there’s a crowd. And especially now when the Chinese new year is coming (it starts on Wednesday and lasts for 15 days) people are like maniacs and act like maniacs. They all are in stores shopping, shopping, and shopping so we are trying to avoid malls right now with the girls. You can’t move there or breathe or do anything else. Everybody is just running after everything golden and red since those colours bring you good luck probably for the rest of your life…You also need to buy sweet meat and all kinds of super extra sweet cakes and candies. One thing that we have cursed with the girls is that Singaporeans seem to be a bit simple minded at times since the whole family thinks the best place to discuss where they should go next is in the middle of the busiest way where it is already hard enough to proceed when people are moving not to talk about when 6 people are standing there blocking the way! They push you around and run into you and suddenly stop right in front of you so that you pump into them. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? And you thought Christmas shopping was a nightmare!

And by the way the best way to notice that Chinese New Year is coming is that you can’t find anything else from the grocery stores than oranges! Oranges here, oranges there, boxes of oranges are everywhere!!! And why? Cause people exchange oranges when visiting friends and relatives during Chinese New Year. That is supposed to (surprise, surprise…) to bring good luck. Good luck seems to mean everything to Singaporeans.

Swimming pool in our hotel. I just loved the place and the garden around our bungalow and so did others too, some people had rented their bungalows for 5 YEARS!!! 

Some beach babes...And let's hit the waves girls!! 

Here we are as wholy as can be! We have been blessed by a priest that sprinkled wholy water on us, then stuck some wholy rice on our foreheads, not to mention those very wholy flowers behind our ears... 

The temple area in Uluwatu looked quite nice I would say...And by the way that purple thing around my waist is new temple fashion 2005, in other words sharong that you have to wear in holy places, not my new skirt...

Darn monkey, it decided it was time for him to learn how to use chopsticks and my hairsticks looked to him a proper practise equipment..Now I have hair sticks with bite marks... 

This is how it starts, my day as an Ace Ventura! The sea turtles were safe way to start to get to know all the animals on turtle island... 

Here's Outi proudly presenting her bat. She said it felt like a leather couch, I could conform that. 

This lizard was kind of nice and heavy but I didn't like too much of it's long nails...Specially when it was trying to pretty much run away all the time evn though it was on the air...Try to hold on to that then... 

It's a gorgeous snake, isn't it? 

There was one really nice waterfall on our way down the river. 

End of our white water rafting. The highlight of our river journey was that "waterfall" behind us that we came down in our boats!! 

But what happened in Bali?

I’m starting to believe there’s a monster living in our mailbox. It must eat all our mail whenever we get some, since the mailbox is always empty! Although there is a one exception. That monster is allergic to Katja’s mail since that girl gets always thousands of letters!! But I guess you’re really not interested of our little monster problem when you can hear about Bali…

Yes, I’m back safe and sound without any surfer guys. Instead I have an empty bank account and a closet full of heavenly surfer clothes! No I’m not addicted to shopping, as a matter of fact; I was the one that bought the least!! And okay, maybe I lied a little about the empty bank account since I would actually really freak out if it would be even close to be empty…Yes, I know, I’m Uncle Scrooge…

Bali can be heaven and hell. The countryside with its rice terraces is just how you imagine paradise to look like. But the towns with over eager salesmen shouting “darling, darling, cheap just for you”, “transportation”, “only a dollar very nice!!!” makes you just to want to run and hide. Since the bomb attack in 2002, just few tourists dare to visit Bali anymore and the locals are trying to make living selling all kinds of crap for tourists.

So what did we do? We went white water rafting, Outi surfed (and almost drowned), I rented a boogie board and got to know the huge waves that way and Annu tested if she could get rabies by letting monkey to bite her. Oh well, of course she didn’t do that on purpose, there was just some psycho monkey in a monkey forest that was jealous at a cute little monkey that was sitting on Annu’s lap eating a banana.

I discovered new sides of myself and for one day I turned into Ace Ventura. We were on a turtle island and I “swam” with sea turtles, shook a bat upside down from its legs, had a huge lizzard on my arms, and some kind of weird staring bird sitting on my arm. Of course this was not enough for me, I wanted more! And while the girls were looking at me terrified, I put a boa snake around my neck. I have no idea why people are so afraid of them. Boa snakes are not slimy or disgusting; they just show you their tong and stare at you like they would want to eat you alive, that’s all!

I’m afraid I’m turning into a man! I talk about cars, I drink beer and now I also kill all the cockroaches for the girls while they are screaming on a chair. Annu and Outi couldn’t have survived without me on Bali, since they can’t stand cockroaches. So every single time somebody came out of the bathroom running and screaming, I walked in sent a cockroach to heaven and made girls very happy.