Lisa Matusova: Continuing to investigate the Finnish character

The last few weeks have been very sated for me, both at work and from a personal point of view.

By now, I have learned that almost all employees at MTV Media are undoubtedly pleasant. During this time, I have had time to tell about my professional work in Russia to approximately to 300 people in more or less details. The meeting with the group that is working to develop the service Jokakoti.fi, a resource devoted to the market of real estate in Finland, became especially interesting. In Russia, we develop a service that in many aspects is similar, dprealty.ru, so we had much to discuss. It has appeared that despite of all the differences of our countries, cultures and Internet audience structures, our projects which begun at the same time (in March, 2009) have the same aims and meet the same difficulties.

My basic working projects these weeks have been to help with the production of the programs made by my department, to analyze the efficiency and expediency of the changes, and also to carry out of a research of dating services in Russia, worldwide and Finland to help my Finnish colleagues to develop their dating service Se Oikea successfully. My work is laborious, but amusing.

In general, my colleagues continue to please and surprise me. I'm very pleased that they accept me very warmly, listen to my opinion and try to please me as much as it possible. For example, they organized an excursion for our department and me to the island Suomenlinna where we took a remarkable walk in places very similar to the country of the Hobbits, even sunbathed a little, and tasted national Finnish cuisine. And concerning to surprises - my colleagues surprised me with their calmness, concentration and quantity of consumption of milk. I never saw so many people simultaneously (at lunch time) consumed such a big quantity of milk. On my question "Why do you drink so much milk?", my colleagues answered: "In our early childhood, our parents tell us that drinking milk is good for the health". I suspect that almost in each country, almost each child is told so almost by each mum, but milk in such quantities is drunk only by Finns.

Also, I was surprised by Finnish birds. They basically do not fly, but walk on foot. Imagine different kinds of birds in different places simply walk by the ground.

And of cause I'm very happy with the affinity of Finland to St.Petersburg that allows my friends and family to visit me, and also to Estonia which I already had visited for one day, having a great time, and also to Stockholm where I am going in October.

I'm convinced that this first month of my stay here is only dispersal for the further GROWth.