I have just started on another Finnish course this time at Helsinki University. Finnish is a very interesting language older than other European languages and only really related to Estonian closely and Hungarian distantly, and the local myth is that its the second most difficult language to learn for an English speaker like me (the [...]
So I have moved lewism.org over to wordpress. The reasons? well I want to expand the site to add a few features that can easily be done with wordpress, I like the community and would like to learn a bit more about weblogs and blogging in general rather than just logging in and writing. I [...]
I Haven’t been writing for a few week because we have a new arrival called Anna who has been keeping us busy but happy. She arrived on the 26th June and both her and Kirsi are doing really well. Eer and now I’m back at work and back online! I shall start to put a [...]
An interesting postcard came through our door a few weeks ago. It has a link to a website on it explaining the details (in Finnish only I’m afraid). It comes from a number of villages in Finland, and is an appeal to ex-members of those villages to relocate back there, and it seems to be [...]
As an Architect you win some and you lose some, I took part with my office in a design competition for Aviapolis Tower which we lost. Davidsson won, and the winning entry image is top left. Its an interesting development mainly because of its height. At about 100 metres high it puts this project at [...]
I recently went to Frankfurt on a business trip. I would have loved to see more and get a proper sense of the place but I ended up with only a bitterly cold night to have a quick look round. Such is the dislocation of coming from a meeting room called Barcelona in Helsinki to [...]
I went ‘home’ to Edinburgh on Friday for the weekend coming back on Monday. I had a full programme but it didn’t feel too busy. Bought some food back from the UK I can’t get here (packet bread sauce amongst other things would you believe!), and got from Dad a copy of his new book [...]
I’ve been listening too the bbc at work recently. I think unlike previous generations of expats you can keep in touch with almost all aspects of life from back ‘home’ and not feel so cut off. I can forinstance go to the news page to keep up to date and even watch programmes like the [...]
Happy birthday dad today,& congratulations again on your forthcoming new book! Buy one of my dads books here from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk. I have some great childhood memories of reading my dad’s books with him but don’t just take my word for it here is a quote of a review from Amazon
Giftwish… ahhhh what a [...]
We went out on Saturday evening for the first time for months and months, and ate at a restaurant called Carelia. Quite unusual for Helsinki it has the atmosphere of an older age, and that’s because it has the interior of an old Pharmacy from the 1920’s. It really has that interwar art-deco feeling which [...]
Me & Kirsi watched Finnish Wifeswap yesterday and realy enjoyed it. On the face of it we should have been bored by the whole thing, as the families got through the swap without any arguments, all changes made seemed to be pretty non confrontational and everything was taken in perspective and rationally. Are Finnish T.V. [...]
I spent most of yesterday at work in a quiet frenzy at work because of the Cricket. I was so tense I could hardly concentrate on anything else but the Radio coverage on the internet all passed by obliviously by my Finnish work colleagues. Such are these times you truely feel like a fish out [...]
Phew we have two cats!
Most of the great men in history have loved cats : Churchill, Newton (inventor of the cat-flap), Dickens, Abe Lincoln, P,G.Wodehouse. By contrast, many of the villains have hated cats , or preferred dogs: Hitler, Napoleon, Mussolini, Stalin.
(stumbling & mumbling)
Archinect has a great resource for this here also bottom drawer blogs pretty well about it from an architects perspective in the usa. Events in seeming slow motion have ratcheted up about this, and it feels hard not to write about this and yet to say anything constructive yet. Flickrs Katrina tag shows so many [...]
My friend Jurgen is coming to visit us in Finland next month. Great to see you mate! It’s a small detour from the main event where he is going to build an earthship in Sweden. NL branch is here. I really believe the future of architecture will be designing in ecological thinking and technology of [...]
I’m very proud because my dad has a(nother) book coming out later this year! & can’t wait to read it…. & no I have to wait like everyone else! The page to order it from is here From the blurb he seems to have answered most of the big universal questions about the universe [...]