My Brother Has a Blog

Well, apparently my whole family has decided to blog. I’m glad!

Meet my brother, Lari:

Things I envy about him:

• he has green eyes, when I got grey
• his tall and slim, I’m short and stodgy
• he speaks fluent Chinese, …I have nothing to say for myself

Lari studied at Fudan University in Shanghai, China for two years.

He speaks excellent Chinese (according to actual Chinese people, I can’t understand him at all). He also has some really interesting stories to tell. He writes his blog in Finnish and Chinese, but also speaks very good English.

I visited him in China twice. First in the spring 2007 with my father and then on Christmas 2007 with both my parents.

This is me and my father and my mother at Fudan University.

China is the only country outside Europe I’ve been to. Also Shanghai is the biggest city I’ve ever been to. Coming from Finland, population 5 million, the most sparsely populated country in the EU, it was super interesting.

Shanghai on the left and Tampere, where I live, on the right.

It was so different, I had wonderful time there.

Nice people, great food, best and worst haircuts of my life…

I learned to play mah-jong. They had this automated mah-jong table at our hotel, so you didn’t have to arrange the tiles yourself.

As a consequence, some nights we ended up playing till five in the morning… This combined with the fact that they were doing construction work at our hotel starting from seven o’clock each morning left me seriously sleep deprived. I also bought a mah-jong set for myself, but since to play it requires four people, I have only played it maybe three times.

This is the set a bought, from a sports store, which I thought was interesting.

I have a lot of memories and photos from China, so I might tell more later on!