Learning for work and about life

This week has maybe been my highlight so far. It started with beautiful weather, and Monday night we had dinner outside and it was not chilly at all. Mid-week was busy: when we hosted two guests, one from Hungary and the other from Serbia. Thus there were also many meetings we attended together with them. Then I also had to finish an important document on Thursday and followed by more meetings. How can you work on your computer and attend meetings? Impossible, so you have to organize your work very well. I managed to do everything as was planned - both meetings and finish the writing. 

On Wednesday we held a workshop for Finnish companies operating in Croatia. The staff at the Embassy was not sure how to do it, so I created a workshop concept which we started develop further together to match the target group and the aims better. We were planning this for many weeks and slowly it was getting form. In the end, it went very well and we received also positive feedback from the company representatives who participated in the event. It is great to see the value of your own skills, experiences and learning. And also learn how to utilize these in practice. 

After this hectic week I thought I could spoil myself a little. On Friday after work I went to this shop that sells Nordic candy. You can chose the candy you like, put them in a bag, the cashier will weight it and you pay for how much you took - in Finnish irtokarkki. It was quite expensive (1,30 e/100 g) but on this special occasion it was OK. The brands sold there were all familiar and they had for instance Finnish Fazer chocolate. In the normal stores here you cannot really buy candy, it is mainly chocolate - Kras made in Zagreb and Milka from somewhere - and you can find one kind of Haribo candy bag. But in this tiny store they had all my favorites, which was just perfect for this afternoon!

I walked up the small hill in town - the oldest part of town, where also the parliament building is. Here is also the Museum of Broken Relationships, where I hadn't been yet. It started as a traveling exhibition, but since 2010 it has been in Zagreb. People donate some object together with a short story about their ended relationships. There are stories from all over the world - Zagreb, Ljubljana, Amsterdam, Vienna, Sarajevo but also from the States, Taiwan, China and many more which I don't remember anymore. The stories told about long-distance relationships, short and passionate relationships, long and painful marriages, several also about a husband running of with a younger girl, some about same-sex relationships and huge age differences between the two partners. As this region has seen several wars in the last decades - the second world war and the Yugoslavia wars - there were also some stories related to those events. And there was a separate section for parent-child relationships which can also be difficult and sometimes end. For some people this was the final letting go of the person and the relationship. Those emotions were reflected in the stories, some of which gave me goose bumps. I love the idea as it is something everyone can relate to. And as the museum puts it: "Hopefully they [the stories] can also inspire our personal search for deeper insights and strengthen our belief in something more meaningful than random suffering."