Who am I?

Uki ja Mummi - grandpa and grandma

As a young man my grandfather, former skidoo champion of Finland, used to work at a car-rent that only rent luxury cars to celebrities and politicians. When he went on the first date with my grandmother, who was quite a diva, a real mannequin, he wanted to impress her and told his brother to dress up like his chauffeur and drive him in one of the most expensive cars to pick her up. Indeed she was quite impressed and started getting interested in this young, supposedly wealthy man. The next date another car, his brother in drivers uniform, my grandmother in her red, satin vintage dress. It continued that way for some time and I don't know at which point my grandfather admitted that he was only a poor sales clerk, and I think only at their wedding she realized that the chauffeur for real was her brother in law.

Papa und Äiti - mum and dad

My father used to be a paratrooper in the military. After his military service he started studying architecture and that was when he met my mother, who had come from Finland to study architecture too, returning to the city she had spent parts of her childhood in. Anyway, after finishing her studies she returned to Finland and my father went to Japan, where he shared a room with an internationally wanted IS terrorist and modeled at a fashion show, representing an ancient darter. Years later he was getting wasted in a hotel room in Denmark with a friend, when he decided to call my mother. They met, got engaged, but when he followed her to Finland he had to find out that she still had a boyfriend there.

Me

To learn something about me it helps to know a little bit about my family. They are all my inspiration and with their stories have aroused the curiosity to travel and get to know places and people. They have all travelled a lot, lived in many different countries and cultures, learned several languages and risen me with the attitude, that the world is wide and worth exploring it. And it's the results of this mental education that I'm going to talk about in this blog post. Here's a little bit about me...

Since I was a child I've spent most of my summers and parts of my winters in Finland. I've always loved it and in my eyes it was the most beautiful country in the world. With 15 I moved there for a year, found my first love, drank my first beer and started thinking that Austria might be the country I've born in, but needn't be my home country. When I came back to Austria I fell into a one summer long teenage-depression, thinking that everything was better in Finland.
After graduating I left home again, this time to Bolivia. I fell in love again, had adventures and grew up. When I returned to Austria, I had become another person. I had seen poverty and suffering and the European life style seemed ridiculous to me. Rules and order, that's what it all seemed to be about. Closed minds and high standards. I started working and studying, trained a lot and missed Bolivia. My aunt once told me that all her life she has spent with one foot in Austria and another one in Finland, what was beautiful but exhausting. I realized that I was about to do the same-again. My thoughts were constantly jumping from one country to another which made it hard to concentrate. I spent way too much time on my phone, trying to stay in touch with my second life 10 thousand kilometers away while I missed too many things right here.

I returned to Bolivia this february and well, everything was like I had left it and that tranquilized me. My chico was still waiting, my kids growing and my room still smelled the same. I think what I feared the most was getting forgotten. I hate to see time passing and friendships ending. I hate to leave a country and see friends leaving and if there's one thing in this world I wish existed, it's teleportation. I spent five weeks there and lived like on another planet, in another universe. I'm a different person there, I dress differently, I speak differently, I have another kind of friends and love latin music. But it's already getting easier for me to return. I don't get culture shocks anymore and adapt in just a second. Anyway, that doesn't alleviate the separation and does not make the distance shorter. The only thing that helps is to know, that things don't change that fast, that people wait and cities don't change- at least not too fast. 

I find it hard to write about myself, I don't like to list my hobbies and analyze my personality. More interesting and helpful I find it to talk about my passion and the forces that drive me. I hope that text gave you a little impression about my personality, my thoughts and desires, and wasn't too boring to read.