This post was most recently updated on October 4th, 2022.
2 min read.I’m staying in the United States of America for the first 6 months of 2017 for both work and leisure. In case you’d need to contact me during that time, that’s doable by normal means (Twitter/email). Just the timeframe’s a tad different due to my location being 8 hours from Finland (-6 UTC time zone). This blog post kind of sets the initial mood and expectations for the trip.
Excuse me – who’s doing what?
So – we are going to the United States. But why?
Well, that’s a valid question. I mean, who in their right mind would want to stay in the USA any more than they have to, now that Trump is going to be the president? I don’t think that many Finns would like to do that (my guess is that around 80% of Finns would vote for a Democrat, no matter who it was), but we are going to do that anyway.
This is actually the last convenient time for me and my wife to travel to another country for a longer period of time without hurting any other activities in our life too much. My wife got, very fittingly, a chance to attend a student exchange program right at the end of her studies (she’ll be graduating next summer, although her studies are largely finished already), so it was a great time to go. My wife primarily applied for a place in a university located in Barbados, but someone making the decision decided to send us to Wisconsin instead. As luck would have it, that also suited us really well (although working and studying at Barbados would’ve been pretty sweet…) as a couple of our American friends turned out to be living nearby. In a way, we didn’t have to start from zero.
What’s to come?
So, what we’ll be doing for the next 6 months, will include a lot of studying for my wife, a lot of working remotely for my Finnish employer for me, and at least some leisurely travel around the USA for us both. I’m expecting the next 6 months to be quite busy – I’ll be working largely as I’d work in Finland, but additionally spending time with the locals, and other international folks at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, I’ll probably be attending a few conferences and of course, we have a lot of practical things to take care of. Should be interesting!
Afterward, we’ll be returning home to Finland – hopefully with our expectations fulfilled, our biases and stereotypes of American shattered, and happy to be located in a country with a reasonably sane (albeit a bit dull) president.
And why this blog post?
I’ll be using this blog to publish some updates on the revelations we’ve encountered, in addition to the usual tech rambling. I plan on actually trying to reflect on the cultural similarities and differences between two Western nations, and of course post a lot of pictures of what we are eating and all that.
Perhaps, afterward, I’ll get to realize some changes in my thinking, and at the very least this trip should give me a chance to reflect on my prejudices toward Americans.
Stay tuned.
Featured image from: https://stocksnap.io/photo/BCMVII6673.
He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.
This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.
- M365 Copilot claiming “You have turned off web search in the work mode”? Easy fix! - November 19, 2024
- “Performing cleanup” – Excel is stuck with an old, conflicted file and will never recover. - November 12, 2024
- How to add multiple app URIs for your Entra app registration? - November 5, 2024
