Elim’s Summa Residency Graduation Ceremony on June 23rd, 2014
and some video clips on youtube
It was held in the Urgent Care Building lower lobby. The reception was beautiful with wonderful appetizers. The shrimp cocktails was great, the chicken kabobs, meatballs, all tasted wonderful. The ceremony itself was moving and funny at the same time. We all had a warm feeling afterwards. Plenty of hugs to go around and tears in every eye. It was a great day.
The sky was gorgeous when I walked Benny so I snapped a picture with my iphone. I even used it to replace the sky in he windmill photo from the Finland trip. Now that I look at it, I think I need to go back and redo it.
Finally, after two weeks of traveling via planes, car, and walking a whole lot and having meals ranging from cold meat and bread to 25 euros martini, we are finally back home. It’s been an exhausting trip for me but Leo has fulfilled his dream and his root searching project.
I tried to take as many pictures as possible to document the experience and the places we discovered. Just finished editing them and putting them online.
Still have video clips to process and eventually putting together a slideshow + video to document the whole thing.
The impression I got for the trip is that Finland is not that much different from the US when you travel in the car. Sure the language is different and they use euros but most of the Finnish people understand English so there is no problem in communication. Their hotels are similar except the bathrooms all have heated floors and even the public bathrooms have bidets. I still haven’t figured out how to use this d* thing yet. In a way, it’s very similar to the modern hotel bathrooms in Taiwan now I think about it.
Along the trip, we got lots of help from the Finnish people, the hotel clerk, the church clerk, almost everyone we approached to ask a question is happy to help us out. And we got lucky in finding places like Leo spotting his great grand father’s grave from the roared as we drove by the graveyard. And the reporter that heard about us and met with us and took us to the house his great, great, grand mother worked as a maid. And through him we got to go inside the house to take pictures and look around.
The documentary would be filled with interesting observations if I start that project sooner than later before I forgot about them.
I regret that I didn’t write much down while I was on the trip. Now that we are home, I would say why didn’t I ask for their names, why didn’t I use my iPhone to get the GPS locations, etc. Yeah, much smarter after the fact.
We are still jet lagged and couldn’t stay awake pass 5pm. Finland is 7 hours ahead of us so that would be midnight Finland time. But hopefully, we will get over it soon and get back to our normal routine.