On Friday evening Sari and I took a train to Hanko, where friends have a flat which we were allowed to use over the Easter days. When I said that I would go to Hanko during that time, most of the Finns that I talked to were asking "What do you want there?" and predicted that we will only see ice and snow. I was not too afraid of that, knowing that Finish people usually exaggerate when they talk about the disadvantages of their beautiful country.

In December 2002 I brought my car to Finland (that is part of a longer story, that I will tell at another time) and arrived one night with the ferry from Rostock to Hanko. That time it was snowing and I just took the road to Helsinki, without seeing anything. In 2004 I came back, but only for a two hour visit and also did not see much of the Southernmost Finish city.

What I missed all this time is the Western part of the Beach and town, where one can find many beautiful wooden houses, which all have different colours that brighten up any grey the Winter might hold. Many of these houses were built around 1890, when Hanko started serving as a place for recreation, mostly for Russian nobles. Finland at that time was a Grand Duchy under Russia.

The Hanko water tower looms high over the city. It is very different from other water towers in Finland and serves the city as a landmark.

Also the Germans left their &ndash as usual belligerent &ndash footprints in Hanko, when Imperial German troops landed in 1918 to support the so-called Finish "white" guards against the Finish socialist and communist "red" guards during the Finish civil-war.

Walking along the beach in Hanko is a special experience during spring time. The sun was shining, the sand on the beach looked inviting and the sea was still frozen. We walked to the "House of Four Winds", which is opend as a cafe in during warmer days.

Although the city center is not as outspoken as the villa-area it is worth a visit, as a small muesum with art of local artist Carl-Gustaf Lilius is located there.

We found Origo, a restaurant in a red wooden house at the harbor. Most of the restaurants are closed during this time of the year, but Origo just had opened on Wednesday for the upcoming summer season. The atmosphere in the restaurant is very special. The low wooden ceiling is held by a wooden structure and the side walls of the building are made of stones, on which candles are placed, from which wax drops down in beautiful shapes. The food is exceptionally good and should be accompanied by a bottle of wine, to make the evening a complete experience.

It is obvious that Hanko must be very beautiful during summer time, when the sunlight emphasizes the colors of the houses and nature. But that does not mean that the town would not be attractive in winter and spring as well. During our visit we met very few people on the streets or the beach, most of the time we walked by ourselves and sometimes even were able to catch some sun. All was quiet and relaxing &nadash; a very beautiful Easter vacation.

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While still deep in the jet lag and unable to do anything challenging, I stumbled over flickr and got enthusiastic about it. That is finally the link that forced me to sort all my pictures and upload them there. It is dead-simple to use and quite effective.

So below are links to some of the collections (so-called "sets") that I uploaded so far to there. Just click on the highlighted names and you will see all the pictures. Click on the pictures below and a slideshow will start.

You can find a complete list of all my sets here.

When the doctor comes to town ...
During August 2005, Johannes and I took trips to Tallinn, Turku and Porvoo.

Theresas Trips to European Capitals
Since 2004, Theresa and I visit at least one European Capital per year. The visits so far were:

• July 2003 – Berlin
• April 2004 – Vienna
• May 2005 – Helsinki
• September 2005 – Athens

Finish Impressions

• Oulu, February 2002
• Around the Olympic Stadion in Helsinki, July 2005
• Savonlinna, August 2005

Some more trips

• December 2001 to Chichen Itza
• January 2002 through the Arizona desert
• July 2002 to Yokohama and Kamakura
• November 2002 to Thailand
• June 2003 to San Francisco

After having Friday afternoon out in the Sanya city center, mostly in a bar together with my favourite chairman and some local beer brands, I slept until Saturday morning and finally adjusted to the Chinese time zone. At 6 o'clock I went up, packed, had a short breakfast, checked-out and went to the local airport. 1.5 hour flight to Hong Kong. There waiting in the airport longue until the flight to Frankfurt was ready. It just took us 12 hours to go from the former British colony to Frankfurt. And from there then another 2.5 hours to Helsinki, where I arrived the night from Saturday to Sunday at 1.00.

My flat had the usual "there was no window open since one week" smell, but still it welcomed me warmly. I switched the computer on and half way on its way up I switched it off again, went to bed and fell into a restless sleep.

On Sunday I found out that the after shave bottle in my luggage broke and everything in the bag had a comfortable and intensive smell to it. The electric razor decided not to survive this attack. I am back to my old wet shaver again. Also looking at my flat at daylight is not the thing I needed after the long flight. Stuff from the Denver trip is still waiting to be cared for, books are piling up in several corners together with dust. There's no food in the fridge and no ironed shirt within these 42 square meters. Somewhere I find a to-do list from which I still cannot cross out anything. And I am still on Chines time zone. It will take a while to adjust to GMT+2 again.

But there is compensation for all of this. The sun shines from a dark blue sky onto snow-white Helsinki. The temperatures are low, which does not seem to be any problem anymore after the humidity and heat in Sanya. The week will bring two concerts in Tavastia. And wet shaving is not that bad after all.

On Tuesday two colleagues and I took a taxi and after the usual uncertainty whether the driver understood us or not, drove to the "Sanya Nanshan Cultural Tourism Zone". It was described as a "buddhist park", which sounds like an ancient religous place. I had read that there is a 108 meter high Buddha statue in that park, which was finished in 2005. After arriving there we understood, that the emphasis is on the words "Tourism Zone".

Impressions from Nanshan ...

It is in fact a good place to lose the last illusions about Buddhism as something purly spiritual. You find it all here: believers on their knees in front of statues, souvenier shops all along the way, entry fees in the realm of those for a Rolling Stones concert and figures of heros that look like they have just fallen out of the latest Pixar movie.

... where Disney and Buddha have a rendezvous.

What is obvious and to my eyes fair is that local pepole pay less money than the few Western tourists, that are not supposed to visit the area for reasons of faith. On the tour busses everything is explained in Chinese language only, but the tour guides are very friendly and some of them spoke good English, so we found out, that the park was built nine years ago.

Buddha off the shore

Nanshan is nevertheless a beautiful place that is for sure worth visiting as long as you do not bring false hopes with you. It is built at the shore, in the middle of hills full of tropical trees and so it looks far away from anything. Some of the places there are quiet and atmospheric. Built next to a fast growing tourist region, having one of the biggest existing religious monumtents in the world right in its center, Nanshan is a monument of Chinas growing wealth and prosperity.

Bob Dylans life once was saved thanks to freedom of speech. He reports about this exceptional event in the very educational and entertaining song Motorpsycho Highway, in which he can only escape from a patriotic American farmer by pretending to be very fond of Fidel Castro (and his beard). Besides that, this song includes violence, shooting, a daring jump out of a window as well as a not very much hidden invitation for having sex, i.e.: all the things that you really miss from modern music.

As said already I am currently in China and the hotel that I am staying in provides a desktop PC in every room, including broadband internet access. It is worth switching it on. After chosing the English version Windows 98 comes up and everything looks normal. Great. So what was the name of the place around here, at which this big Buddha statue is located? Just type in http://en.wikipedia.org and ... uuups: Error message. Maybe the network is down. But no, http://www.spiegel.de comes up fine.

After several tries it became clear, that I could just not access Wikipedia from here. I was not sure whether it is generally blocked from China or it is just not available due to additional security measurements in this hotel, and found more on this issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_mainland_China.

What do we learn from this? Maybe that you do not need freedom of speech if you can express your preferences for Castro without running into problems. Maybe that every blocked page is in good company. Maybe that you need to experience a restriction yourself to find out about what it really means.

What I appreciate is the internet access via my mobile phone (GPRS). It connects to the network via Finland and there is no blocking inbetween. Maybe it's after all not too bad to work in this industry.