2010 will go down in history as the year where the 4 seasons were picture perfect herabouts in the far north (@banton dixit). If you don’t believe me, check out the stuff below.
Autumn in Finland
Tag Archives: photography
Welcoming N8
Mexico City & Ixtapan de la Sal
We spent two weeks in Mexico on holiday. We didn’t have any plans for travelling around the country as the main goals were to participate in certain social occasions: we attended a wedding, birthdays, the Mexican Independence Bicentennial and even the birth of my niece. Even so, we managed to slip away for a couple of nights to Ixtapan de la Sal, a small spa town not far away from Mexico City.
Turkey one last time
Was in Istanbul, Kayseri & Ankara to see through the project that has brought me to Turkey. Since we were over a week here we had some time to see some of the sights, which was more than welcome. A big thanks to my colleagues and business partners for making the project a success and the stay enjoyable.
Holidays in China, part II
Holidays in China, part I
We spent 2 weeks in July in China. Our route took us to Beijing where we stayed a few days, then we took an overnight train to Chongqing from where we boarded a ferry through the Yangtze River and the 3 Gorges to Yichang. After sleeping there the night we took another train to Shanghai, where we stayed 4 days before returning back to Finland via Beijing. It was quite a route as you can appreciate in the map below (we spent 60 hours in trains).
It was very interesting as an experience, the sights are amazing, generally very safe, the people are usually kind and I thoroughly enjoyed the food. However, we were more than once assaulted by culture shock. China is not renowned for being one of the cleanest places on earth and the crowds, while expected, are not nearly as polite as in Japan or even Mexico. However, as usual, the story is better told in pictures and videos (the rest are found in my Flickr stream as before).
Riga
We were lucky enough to have spent a couple of days of the Easter weekend in Riga, capital of Latvia. The city has a great collection of Jugendstil (German Art Noveau) buildings from the 1930’s and it was very nice to walk in its cobbled streets, even if the weather was not much better than Finland. It was very interesting to see how much investment has come from the Nordic countries, with a large amount of Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian companies present in the country and a partly-renovated airport that looks decidedly similar to those of Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm & Helsinki with its use of wood, glass and iron.
The country has a long history of foreign occupations from Germany, Sweden and Russia, so a visit to its museums is definitely recommended to get some background information on the way the country came to be what it is. Furthermore, it currently tries to recover from the after-effects of the global financial crisis, when it’s economy pretty much collapsed. Not surprisingly, travelling here is relatively cheap, but due to inflation consumer prices are almost at Scandinavian levels.
The break was very welcome indeed and I’m happy to have crossed out the last of the Baltic countries I was missing.
Science poems in the Tube
Found in my most recent trip to London.
Real winter in Finland
The current winter in Finland is the continuously coldest, snowiest I have ever experienced after 9 years here. With temperatures averaging -10 (but reaching -27, without the windchill) and an amount of snowfall that is reaching a metre, the place looks and feels decidedly wintry. I mean, there’s more snow here than in Lapland!
Mexico notes, part 2
- Flamingoes in close-up in Celestún, Yucatán
- 5 km of virgin beaches in Celestún, Yucatán.
The only not so nice detail was when on meeting some people I hadn’t seen in a long time I realised that the crab mentality seems to be alive and well in certain sectors of society. Shame, but hey, what can you do. 😉 Overall it was great and I cannot wait to be back again, if only for holidays.