Hello guys and gals! To my potentially huge audience (probably not even one), it's been a while. Since my last update, I have changed employment which has led to drastically fewer intercontinental trips and chances to have interesting discussions with seat buddies.
I'm still living in Shanghai and luckily about a month back I had an opportunity to visit Finland after what seemed like an eternity (a little over a year). It's a long time and lots of things can happen. For example, I stayed touch with Xavier from my previous post and we became badminton buddies. Unfortunately a few months back he moved away from Shanghai.
This time, however, I also met quite interesting people, on both ways.
PVG-HEL: Heli and Venla. On my way to Finland, my seat buddies were two young girls, fresh graduates from high school in Hämeenlinna, a smaller city north of Helsinki. They were visiting Shanghai for two weeks on account of Heli being the daughter of one of the Finnish expats sent to oversee a Finnish company's Shanghai operations.
It was actually Heli's third time to China within a year and this time she got her best friend Venla to go with her. The arrangement Heli's family had with the company was that since the rest of her family moved with Heli's dad to Shanghai, but Heli chose to stay behind due to finishing up her senior year at the high school, the company would pay Heli three roundtrips to see her family per year. Pretty good, huh!?
However, even after two previous times, Heli's trip to Shanghai seemed to be quite uneventful, at least to me. For example, they didn't even try to go see any sights outside of town. Just shopping. They even mentioned this giant mall Global Harbor which I've visited and it is indeed huge. Getting around the city was also pretty easy as they had Heli's dad's driver accompany them most of the time. I guess the only downside was when the A/C unit on one of the girl's rooms was broken. I can see that in the middle of the heat wave that might've been uncomfortable. But outside, they said the hot sun doesn't even make their skins tan. Gotta suspect there's something in the air even when the PM2.5 and whatnot indices are all green.
Now that the summer's over, the girls will go their separate ways. Heli will continue her studies at Haaga-Helia's Porvoo city campus (Haaga-Helia is one of the so-called Universities of Applied Sciences in Finland, a higher education establishment). Meanwhile, her friend Venla, whom I unfortunately did not have a chance to speak much to, will seek new adventures by volunteering to undergo the Finnish military service, which is compulsory for men. There's a good reason for Venla's interest, though: she eventually aspires to become a policewoman and the military service is seen as a big plus when applying to the blues.
HEL-PVG: Ying. This young professional has just been to Finland on a month-long training. Turns out, she's an engineer. Well, actually doing sales and project management, but in a engineering company and having an engineering background herself as well. She works at Howden, originally a Scottish industrial engineering company. They have acquired a Finnish company called Fläkt Woods and sent Ying, who works at Howden's Beijing office, up to the Nordic to get to know their products.
For Ying's return trip, she actually failed to get a Beijing flight, so she flew to Shanghai instead (an extra hour flight time!) and then takes a u-turn and continues with a domestic flight back (another 2 hours flight time...). Having grown up in Xi'an and studied at the famous university city Wuhan, Ying didn't have much experience about abroad prior to working life. However, at Howden, she's met colleagues from all over the world, such as Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (of course), Japan and even South Africa. They used to have some Finns down here in China too.
Yet according to Ying, the cultural shock seemed too much for many of them, for it's rare for a Finnish engineering soul to really be able to tolerate China for long. Not even after trying to put effort into studying Chinese language, like some have attempted. Harsh reality is that just studying an hour and a half each week doesn't really cut it if you don't have an opportunity or incentive to use the language everyday, and the Finnish quiet, uninviting demeanor does the rest of the scaring potential conversation outreaches.
However, the most interesting part of Ying's story is that her field of study is the same as my father's, fluid and aerodynamics. So, pretty intense and hardcore science stuff. Unfortunately, according to Ying, she doesn't really get to use her skills on her current job, and might even consider changing to a totally different career. To me (as someone without the so-called hard skills such as in-depth engineering knowledge and experience), that just sounds crazy.
But often the grass is greener on the other side, isn't it?
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