Seat Buddy Profiles: Meet Heli, Venla, and Ying

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.

Seat Buddy Profiles: Meet Jinzhao, aka Xavier

My luck with the Chinese seat buddies seem to continue on my way back from Finland. His business card has the name Xavier, but for all intents and purposes, he's a Chinese guy. So we call him Jinzhao (金昭) as it is his real first name.

The first impression I got from him was that he's intense. Waiting for our plane to take off, he was constantly writing stuff on his iPad Air. It was only after the plane was taking off and he had to put the tablet away that I ventured to strike a conversation with him, so as to not disturb his note-taking. At first I thought it was some kind of diary of a journey, but he said it was work-related. Who the hell writes work notes on an iPad anyway, before take-off? And I would think he's got a laptop for this kind of stuff.

Well, guess what, Jinzhao is not only an entrepreneur but a young one: he's just 27 years old, two years younger than me.

Seat Buddy Profiles: Meet Yanwen and Mingjian

This is exciting. Since the beginning of my Seat Buddy Profiles series, I've yet been able to write a profile on Chinese travelers. I've had seat buddies who are Chinese, obviously, but last time it was a middle-aged guy who was mostly concerned in sleeping throughout the flight, and before that I did have a very interesting discussion with a Chinese tour guide, but it was long before I started this project and I'd mostly forgotten what we talked about.

This time was also a bit different because I flew via Moscow, because the non-stop between Shanghai and Helsinki by Finnair was simply overbooked and thus too expensive. Yay Aeroflot for: 1) better in-flight film and entertainment selection, 2) little luxury such as slippers and eye-shades (yes, even in economy!), but nay for the lagged-behind luggage due to extreme short layover time in Moscow, which in turn was because of the first flight being delayed... Well, I could consider myself lucky that the luggage arrived the next day and didn't get lost, for example.

Anyway, you probably came here to read about Yanwen and Mingjian, and not hear about my rambles about airlines.

Seat Buddy Profiles: Meet Ari

Well, looks like after a longer hiatus, these profiles just keep on piling up. This will also be my first one on a Shanghai-bound flight from Helsinki, so switching maybe the perspective just a little bit - or not. We'll see.

First of all, a PSA: row 54, middle seats. For reasons unbeknownst to mankind, the Finnair A340s only have two seats in the middle on this row. But the real meat of the deal was the surprise extra space. There is just a little bit more distance to the row in front of you, and it makes all the difference in terms of comfort. The previous encounter I wrote about happened actually on the row behind it, and as I couldn't get any better seats this time around either (i.e. "exit seats" with additional legroom due to door positions,) I tried to experiment with some minor tweaks. Apparently, it paid off.

Seat Buddy Profiles: Meet Ville and Roman

In this (hopefully) recurring series, I will write about people that happen to get seated beside me on intercontinental flights, usually between Helsinki and Shanghai, the two cities I frequently travel between. You can check the first post in the series here.

Howdy guys, it's been a while! I know it because I actually skipped one profile when flying to Shanghai last time. That was because my buddy happened to be a middle-aged-ish (I'm certainly no expert in Asian people's age) Chinese guy who didn't as much as say two words to me the entire trip, but rather concentrated on sleeping. Fortunately, on my return trip we get two for the price of one!

Seat Buddy Profiles: Meet Helena

First of all, just a few paragraphs about the five years between 2009 and now (2014), to whomever still reads this and doesn't know me. During my 2009 trip to China, I met my then-girlfriend, who now is my lovely wife. I also met the then-Consul General of Finland in Shanghai who became my first summer traineeship employer (I did return to Shanghai in 2010 to work in the Finnish Consulate during the Expo 2010 summer). He went on to become Ambassador of Finland in Seoul, Korea and we still keep in touch.

From that summer on, it was a real roller-coaster of years to me. Our film that we worked on during 2008 and 2009 was released in Finland following the participation to Shanghai International Film Festival and was a huge success. I was asked to join Rovio, a small budding Finnish company who made the hugely successful game and entertainment franchise "Angry Birds." Not so small anymore. I helped the company globalize to Asia, being one of the co-founders of our Shanghai office in 2012. We got married the same year. 

Since then, I've been traveling extensively back and forth between China and Finland, and it was during my latest flight that I decided to write about the different stories of my "Seat Buddies," i.e. random people sitting beside me on the flight. This is one of the first such profile. Please meet Helena, a Swedish silk and fabric trader-on-air.