It's getting close to Midsummer

The first half of 2019 is nearing its end and I can tell you that the time has truly flown by. The Sales and marketing team has been keeping busy flying and driving around Europe these past few months. We’ve visited seven different countries on roadshows, attended several conferences and as a result met a lot of new interesting people and old acquaintances.

It hasn’t been any less busy in the lab either. Our chemists and lab technicians have been working full speed all spring while the study directors have been planning the studies and writing reports for the customers. If there has been any “extra time”, it has been used to run R&D projects or installing and testing new hardware.

All this hard work has paid off as we’ve acquired many new customers during the past six months and business is booming. We actually made a new monthly sales record in May by a wide margin! We celebrated this by having lunch on the house and after work picnic in sunny summer weather.

Speaking of summer, the holiday season in Finland is about to start this week as Saturday is juhannus (Midsummer Day). Most Finnish people pack their cars after the workweek and head to their summer cabins to enjoy the Midsummer closer to the nature. The weather forecast for the weekend looks a bit unstable but OK enough (at least it won’t be snowing this year ‒ yes, this a real possibility) for enjoying the typical Midsummer activities which include spending time with family and relatives, having a barbecue, fishing, swimming, a bonfire and, of course, sauna.

You can’t really have a Finnish holiday without sauna and Midsummer is the most important sauna time day of the year. There is nothing better than having a nice hot sauna by the lake on Midsummer Day and occasionally dropping down to the cool lake for a swim. The most ardent sauna enthusiasts might go on like this all through the night! Many also use birch whisks to lightly whip themselves and others in the sauna, according to an old tradition. This might sound extremely weird and unpleasant but it’s actually really refreshing and relaxing at the same time.

Midsummer or “Midsommar” in Sweden is celebrated much the same way as it is in Finland as people mostly abandon cities to spend time in the countryside with friends and family. However, the Swedes are not that heavy into bonfires and whipping themselves with tree branches in the sauna (or “bastu” as they call it) but they compensate this flaw by singing a lot of merry songs, wearing flower wreaths and doing a funny frog dance around a maypole.

In whatever way you are planning on spending your summer, the Admescope team would like to wish you happy holidays and recommend that you take some time to enjoy the nature and forget about work, for a short while at least.

Written by Jouni Jukka

P.S. We will be closing shop for Friday this week as it’s a national holiday but otherwise we will stay open and will be running studies all summer.