Perth - West Australia

Alright. Back to business. I've been back in Oz for about two weeks now and I'm starting to adjust to the pace again. The first week was surprisingly tough physically and mentally partly due to a lack of sleep caused by jet lag. Also, it is somewhat challenging to focus on schoolwork again after a break such as the one I had.

Life certainly throws some surprises along the way without going into deeper meanings. I've spent the last three days in Perth, WA. How the hell did I get here? Yeah, good question. I had no idea I was going to be travelling here until one evening before my departure. We were celebrating our colleague's birthday at Fox Studios in Sydney and my boss and he started talking about an urgent shipment of old cognac to Perth. It needed to be delivered as soon as possible and apparently airfreight was crazy expensive. It was at that point when my boss came up with an idea that I could take the shipment to Perth as excess baggage since that would be cheaper and I didn't have anything planned for the weekend anyway. Could be that the booze had blurred his thinking a bit there and the following morning after he had booked me on a next Qantas flight, they decided that the shipment was still a bit too big for me to handle by myself. "Well Tero, it's all booked anyway so have a nice holiday in West Australia". What can I say…

It was almost a six-hour domestic flight from Sydney to Perth as we had some headwind on the way and once again I must say that I've really started hating long flights. However, the long weekend I had here in Perth and Scarborough beach was amazing. It just so happened that an old friend of mine, Antti, lives in Perth these days. We had already discussed the possibility for me to come visit him and vice versa while we're both in Australia, but I didn't really see this one coming on such short notice too. Well, it was all good. Or not just good, GREAT. Perth is really the pearl of this country isolated in the far western coast of Australia - by the Indian Ocean. It's got a population of over 1,5 million people and a really nice downtown area, and the surroundings are also beautiful. Once again, it is at the same time a lot more accessible and easier to handle than Sydney, for instance. This would be a perfect place to live in, make no mistake about it. Even during these "cold" winter months, we experienced temperatures between 18-22 C every day. It was party, party, party…and some really nice discussions. Right now I am typing this entry from a beach. Lots of surfers and Fremantle's busy port in the horizon.

OK. Now it's back to Sydney, back to work, back to the hectic lifestyle. This was like taking a deep breath before the plunge. Next week will be interesting. Value Chain Management starts, I need to prepare for a couple of presentations, we will have a "Roadshow" for work (sort of a gala) and then of course the house-warming party on Saturday…among other things. Check out the new pics from Perth and enjoy the rest of the summer - wherever you are. I will most probably return to my blog after the upcoming weekend.

Cheers.