Realtime ramblings
- My Top 3 #lastfm Artists: Anthony Marks - Usborne (12), Lila Downs (1) & Gustavo Santaolalla (1) #music http://t.co/xFBgvdlz 2 days ago
- MP's call to pardon 'hero' Turing. I didn't even know one of the founders of modern computer was gay. http://t.co/530HHytU 5 days ago
- You can choose to be happy and the benefits are immense: http://t.co/FqmObzAr 5 days ago
- Ideas para sobrevivir -20C http://t.co/4b4Iytdn cc@cesar_octopus 5 days ago
- @proyectopanenka yo sigo esperando que la #panenka04 esté disponible en versión PDF. 6 days ago
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Tag Archives: photography
Autumn in Finland
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.
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.

Chile en Nogada is only available around Mexican Independence Day and consists of a Poblano chilli stuffed with prepared ground meat in a nut sauce and obviously adorned with Mexican colours.

A restaurant in Mexico will live or die by its availability of good sauces, so they are presented like this.

Mexico City air quality is not as bad as it used to be in the beginning of the 90's. It also helped that late summer is the rainy season.

Paying our respects at the Virgin of Guadalupe main shrine. A manifestation of the Virgin Mary, it is said that maybe not all Mexicans are Catholics but all are Guadalupanos.

According to legend, the Virgin appeared to an Indian atop a mountain almost 500 years ago, and there they built her shrine.

Tostada de pata, tamal de rajas & tamal oaxaqueño at the Mexican Independence Day bicentennial dinner
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.

The only problem I encountered during the trip was that I had to wake up extremely early to catch connecting flights. This sunrise was taken at Istanbul Ataturk airport.
Holidays in China, part II

Shennong Stream off Yangtze River. Before the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam, the river was so difficult to sail that to go upstream you needed to be pulled along by trackers. Clothing optional.

The hotel in Yichang was nice. The city itself was not that interesting. They seemed to have ads for a local corn-based liquor everywhere.

Trying to get out of the vantage point of the previous picture at the Oriental Pearl TV tower. This is why we were surprised by the lack of courteousness in Chinese crowds: people would run, push and shove as much as possible in a situation that was potentially very dangerous.

Chinese painting at Shanghai museum. Probably the best museum in China, the ceramic, jade, copper and painting collections are worth the visit.

Mexican pavillion at the World Expo: Replica of the Bell of Independence from the church of Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato.

The Mexican pavillion had an introduction to Mexican art & history, but my favourites where these masks where you could see different parts of Mexico through the eyes of someone living there.

The Finnish pavillion had an overview of Finnish design, and while there was not a lot of food on offer there was a big space for Nokia

The Belgian pavillion focused more than anything on science and technology (and beer and chocolate, sure). They had a video that Frank de Winne, Belgian ESA astronaut, recorded from space for the Expo.

The former French concession at Xintiandi was a nice stop. After two weeks, we were starting to miss certain European comforts like street cafés, sandwiches or good beer.

Ready to fly back from Beijing. One of the decisive factors that convinced us to go to China was that it is only a 8 hour direct flight with Finnair.
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).

It was extremely foggy when we visited the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu. Somehow doesn't surprise me as I had the same luck at the Cristo de Corcovado.

Imagine my surprise when we went to a restaurant specialising in Peking duck and found out it's eaten almost like a taco.

The standard "soft sleeper" cabins in Chinese trains are quite good. Pity the toilets are an absolute disaster, even in the newest trains. In fact, not only in trains, but pretty much everywhere. Maybe the government should start a nationwide "Be dignified, learn to use a loo" campaign?
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.

The country has a sizable Russian-speaking minority, so foreign TV programmes are dubbed in Latvian and subtitled in Russian.
Science poems in the Tube
Found in my most recent trip to London.
Posted in in english
Tagged culture, literature, photography, science, united kingdom
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!









































































