The Travels of Päivi and Santeri

Renting a summer cottage from Clavoillon in Burgundy Vineyards, France. The province of Burgundy (Bourgogne) is famous for its vineyards and white wine. We spent a month in this beautiful area and continued our cheese pilgrimage.

La Loire in France and Rhein in Germany and Switzerland are like night and day. They are like the blood veins of Europe.

Travel literature review: the world of fiction and reality TV, where life itself is a travel.

People come to the world famous Mobile Phone Cliff to throw their mobile phones into the sea in Hong Kong.

After living 2 months in Hong Kong we like it more than in the beginning. We'll be returning to Hong Kong countryside some day, not the city center.

Chinese anarchist sounds like something that can not exist, but here is a photograph of one as a proof. Here is a funny photo we took of a Chinese anarchist.

Warm Feet and Happy Feet. This is how Päivi's feet survived the harsh winter in Hong Kong. The winter in Hong Kong was very cold thanks to climate change. Here is a photo about how Päivi's feet survived. It's pretty cold. Hope this photo will warm you up a bit.

Travelling around China by train is fast. You can cross the country in less than two days.

Our first Chinese hospitality exchange experience took us to Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province. It is not easy to find Chinese people among hosts and so we were very grateful to Lee and her roommate Barbara. They welcomed us wholeheartedly and took us to their family. Lee came to meet us at the train station when we arrived. That was actually the first time in one and a half years that somebody did so. Imagine how great it feels when you arrive tired from a 20-hour train trip and somebody is greeting you happily like an old, long awaited friend. These things we have really grown to appreciate when travelling a long time in countries where most of the time we don’t know anyone.

Nanjing has a surprisingly lively expat community considering that more internationally appealing Shanghai is just a few hours’ away. But Nanjing has a few advantages: living is cheaper and people are more patient with foreigners. The one and only reason why we stopped in Nanjing was doing hospitality exchange. People don’t usually come to the city that much for tourism as for a longer stay, for example to learn Chinese or to teach English. All of our hosts and other hospitality exchange people we met were teachers. That seems to be, actually, de facto for foreigners everywhere in China. Somehow expatriates are always polarised by the purpose of their stay. For example in Thailand it was sex tourism .