Sadly our trip has come to an end. Even though it was exhausting and I’m so glad to sleep in my own bed without worrying about rolling over onto Nicole, I had such a fun time. We agree that we will never forget the time we had in Scandinavia and will miss all the friends we made along the way.
We spent our last few days of this Scandinavian trip in Helsinki. Finland was definitely a change in environment from Sweden. There was so much construction around the city. Sadly this included the tourist hotspots like the Helsinki Cathedral that we planned on seeing. It was still beautiful but you can’t help but notice the scaffolding in our pictures.
In terms of business visits, we got to hear presentations about Business Finland/Helsinki Partners and CSC (IT Center for Science). Although the majority of the presentation at CSC went straight over all of our heads, the parts I did understand were interesting. I have a bunch of notes on supercomputers and quantum computing, however, I don’t think I could explain to you anything that I wrote down.
Business Finland & Helsinki Partners
Our first business visit in Finland was to a government owned company called Business Finland. Finland only has 5.5 million people in the country. They really want to attract international talent to Finland so they set up a company that helps set up businesses and people in Finland.
Finland is one of the most innovative countries in Europe. One of the reasons for their innovative success is that they are highly digitized and have a high percentage of educated people. Some inventions that Finnish people have created are heart rate monitor belts, electric solar sails, and wind turbines.
The country wants to attract people and business that will help them remain a top innovative company, so they set up Business Finland. Business Finland invests in businesses, helps set up people from other countries, and attracts other major international companies to set up their businesses, plants, and data storage facilities in Finland.
Finland is big into green energy. By 2035, they want to be a carbon neutral and fossil fuel free country. They plan to replace their fossil fuels with renewable energy from wind, water, solar, and nuclear power. Their commitment and competence in green energy convinced an international company to set up 3 green hydrogen plants in Finland.
Much like Sweden, Business Finland is interested in sustainability. However, their main concern seems to be growth. I got the sense that Sweden was environmentally friendly because it is the right thing to do, but Business Finland uses sustainability as a strategy to help grow and attract talent and businesses. They are not wrong for doing this, but it is interesting to see the differences between the neighboring countries.
It also seems that, just like Sweden, Finland stresses a good work-life balance and encourages spending time with their families. In fact, they mentioned that there was a free orchestra performance specifically for babies/kids. It was interesting to not only hear about this aspect of Finland’s business culture but from someone who was born in the US.
Marketing Conference
We were already planning on going to the marketing conference to support Dr Myhr, but I wanted to go a little early to see the presentation before his that seemed interesting. It was a paper on “the use of artificial intelligence in travel planning” and how different personality traits affect users’ perception of these AI tools. Unfortunately this study was still in its early stages so I can’t tell you their findings.
It was also great to watch Dr. Myhr’s presentation at the conference! Seriously guys, you should’ve gone to see our professor speak. Even though it was the last presentation of the day and we were already behind schedule, he was still able to keep the audience’s attention. It was definitely helpful
Time to Leave
Obviously the universe could never let us end this trip on a peaceful note. Even though the trip was technically over, we had some issues getting back home. So basically, Stella got an email from Finnair warning her that the Helsinki airport was going to be busy and to arrive 4 hours early. Of course we followed this advice as our airlines sent a similar email, however, we forgot to factor in the fact that our flight was technically not an international flight and the advisement was to arrive 2 hours early, not 4. Because of this, the check-in desk wasn’t open yet, so we couldn’t check our bags. Meaning we then sat there for 2 hours waiting instead of peacefully waiting for our flight past security.
Eventually we got to our gate and made it through our first flight on our journey home. Even though it was a 1+ hour layover, this time it was an international flight, so our boarding time was an hour before departure. So we rushed to the bathroom and then to our gate, just to find out that we were changing aircrafts and moving to a different gate. With this gate change, our flight was delayed by an hour, giving us less than an hour at the next airport before our final connecting flight. Then of course, when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, our flight got delayed again. Now to the point where there was no way we’d make our connecting flight to California. Nicole ended up changing our flight to one that departed later. So instead of landing in Santa Ana at 10pm, we ended up landing at LAX at midnight. Since we landed so late and I was staying at my friend’s place in Irvine, I ended up going to sleep at 3-4 am. There goes another day without any sleep. So now here I am on my 10th flight within the past 2 weeks on the way back to Hawaii.
