Visited Tallinn for a short break during Easter weekend. Unlike Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland, the weather there was still wintry. A summary in pictures below, the rest in the usual place.
Know your market part one
Tallinn city walls
Town hall
Courtyard
Tallinn city walls and archery challenge
Orthodox cathedral
Tallinn Old Town panorama
Spanish spoken in Tallinn
Know your market part two
This is wrong on so many levels: The Silja "Latin" show promotional poster
Posted in in english
This is where the first Japanese picture was filmed in Finland was shot. A beautiful, heartwarming movie about friendship, food and cultural encounters, I wholeheartedly recommend it for a slow day.
The proper Mexican food invasion in Helsinki continues. After Café de Nopal opened at the end of 2010, a separate team set up Pueblo in Eerikinkatu 25 during 2011.
I know some of the Mexican staff personally. Their tortillas are excellent and they have my favourite beers on offer, but the food is sometimes a little too salty for me (I cook without salt, so that might be the problem). Regardless, it is very nice to have an alternative open during lunchtime in the heart of the city.
I read somewhere that the Helsinki ice hockey derby between HIFK & Jokerit is the most fiercely contested in the Nordic countries. Even if I don’t cheer for either team, as a neutral it was nice to attend a match with a nice atmosphere and chanting, not only clapping.
You know that horrible feeling when you start writing drafts you haven’t finished and they start piling up? After four months I have finally freed this blog’s backlog, with the list of newly-published posts below:
A couple of European colleagues joined me in my last business trip to Mexico and they seemed genuinely surprised by what they saw. It was not as unsafe as they were led to believe, the people were more ethnically varied than they expected, it was not as poor (even though of course they did see a cross-section of Mexican society from wealthy city denizens to farm hands in the hills) and the food was better than they thought.
Also at some point I spent some time with a group of Finnish gentlemen who had a lot of questions about the country, which I did my best to answer in the little time we had together (personal favourite: why do all houses have water tanks in the roof?).
Maybe the place is indeed quite misunderstood as I’ve been saying all these years. I’m not saying it’s better or worse, it’s just not what people abroad without previous experience of the country think.
Posted in in english
Tagged culture, europe, finland, mexico, security, society, travel, united kingdom
I’m allergic to beans. Maybe that’s why I had to flee so far I ended up in Finland 
. Take the delicacy above, called huarache, for example. It happens to have beans inside the dough, and made me sick the whole night after I ate it. At least I didn’t end up in hospital with serum like the time before that.
It’s ridiculous. It’s akin to a Finn being allergic to potatoes or a Japanese being physically unable to eat seaweed.
Spent a little over a week in Mexico for work. Visited Mexico City for a few days and then drove all the way to León, Guanajuato for the Rally Guanajuato Mexico. A picture summary below, the rest of the photos here.
Flying over Greenland
Mom's hole in one ball
More farm animals for the toddlers
Press conference with Ken Block and Chris Atkinson
Available transportation in case rally cars are too fast for you
Cool Cervantino t-shirt
Rally fans give it all
Street Stage in Guanajuato
Walking hangover
SS22 Guanajuatito
SS22 Guanajuatito
Mexico City suburbs
Hay dos maneras de practicar esquí de fondo con un bebé de brazos: te lo puedes poner en una mochila o si ya tiene más de 6 meses puedes sentarlo en un trineo especialmente diseñado para ello (obviamente abrigado adecuadamente en ambos casos)
El caso es que ser papá no significa empezar a echar panza.
