The Travels of Päivi and Santeri

Our visit to Skopje had a mission: we wanted to be positively impressed. The previous time we were in the city — ten years ago — we only changed buses at the main bus station and had a somewhat a miserable time. We were waiting for our connecting bus to Serbia in the late hours of a Friday evening. All seats in the waiting area were taken by local hooligans, and we didn't have a single Macedonian dinar to pay a visit to the toilet. Nobody wanted Euro at that time and the only currency exchange booth was closed. When our connecting bus finally arrived, we were happy to leave.

This wasn't our first visit to Albania. We had crossed the country on our previous Balkan tour ten years earlier but didn't get a very good impression then. Now everything was different. We stayed longer, tried different parts of the country from north to south, and fell in love with the Mediterranean coast. We ended up staying in Saranda close to the Greek border, a 30-minute ferry ride from Corfu. Saranda is a small former fishing village with approximately 15 000 inhabitants. It is big enough to have different kind of supermarkets and services and small enough for it being laid-back.

Dear Mr. Niinistö, I am deeply concerned about the current state of affairs in Finland. We left Finland in 2004 to travel the world. We have been living in 102 countries around the world, and travelled through countries devastated by the US, NATO, and Russia. The last three years we lived in Georgia , which is at war with Russia . There is a ceasefire agreement, but a peace accord was never signed. Russia – the second biggest arms exporter in the world right after the US – benefits from such instability.

We had our first winter in 17 years. Snow looked incredibly beautiful and we enjoyed the opportunity to see many of our friends and relatives in Finland and reconnect with our roots .

Photos of our 17th wedding anniversary in Tampere, Finland on the never-ending honeymoon trip.

Welcome to the milieu of our newest book

The first of Santeri's six new musical pieces was published in our Batumi street dog video . The rest are listed below. It has been sixteen years since Santeri composed last time. We were living in Buenos Aires at the time. You can find those old songs in midi and mp3 format including musical scores from Downloads directory on our new Nomad & Travel Books website. The same website is also home for our new, mobile-friendly Travel Photo Albums with a cool new photo and album search functionality.

Statistics has always been Päivi's Achilles' heel. She has been struggling even with the most basic formulas and calculations mixing up averages, medians, and probabilities. To tackle her weakness, Päivi decided to get her 3rd PhD degree on statistics. Her first PhD was on Finnishness (Tampere University, Finland) and the second on Global Nomads (Tilburg University, Netherlands) . The newest thesis is on Qualitative Statistics, which is a new, emerging research area thanks to the booming Artificial Intelligence research.

A video of friendly street dogs playing with us on the beach in Batumi, Georgia.

Georgian Revenue service is providing information on tax free shopping and the VAT refund on their website , but unfortunately in Georgian only. As the process is quite different than in other countries, we decided to share our experiences about it.