What a weekend! I was interviewing maids, like six or seven of them. Let me start from the beginning, everyoene here, especially a foreigner, is supposed to have a maid. That was mentioned first time in the job interview in Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Finland. Strange idea to us "middle class" representatives, who are not used to the idea. But, I got used to it. No cleaning for two years (Pekka would add to that, that I have not been cleaning last 5 years we have been together, but it is not true). Yeah!

So, we decided that we would like to have a maid who can babysit, clean and cook. Like everything in one person, most of my colleagues with children have 2-3 maids, but we decided that one is enough because Pekka is on paternity leave and takes care of Toivo. So, when we moved into our new home, we mentioned to couple of persons that we are looking for a maid. It took an hour and the phone started ringing. Is has been ringing for a week now and I counted that about 20 candidates have called. I took to an interview 6 or 7 of them, or even more, but all of them did not show up due to APEC traffic.

One after one they came to us on Friday and Saturday and I kept a short interview for them. Most of them were asking a salary which I know is overpriced here. (Well, it is still less than USD 1,50/hour). Anyway, in the end of the day we decided to employ a 30 years old lady called Anh, who had very good references of babysitting even younger babies than Toivo, and who was very nice and spoke satisfactory English, is ready to clean and cook. And the most important, she was happy with the salary we were offering. So, hopefully in 2 weeks time she could start and later on we may hire a little extra staff for cleaning. It is so dusty here that the floors need to be wiped daily, so I now understand why people have so much staff working in big houses.

We still do not have internet connection at home. But we have lots of new friends in our zoo, and a broken water pipe... The shipment from Finland has arrived, but due to a very bureaucratic (did I spell it right?) paper work it may take a week or another before we get it home. When we have skype working at home again, I will have lots of interesting stories to tell which I can not tell here...

My special thanks to my brother and niece who had made such a wonderful Father's Day Power Point to my dad "pappa", as we all now call him. Nevertheless he does not use the computer, I am sure "mummi" has shown the slide show to him.

Hugs to everyone around the world. Take care and write me soon again.