Together with his wife, Zoran Kanti-Paul has built a very successful language and culture training company in just eight years. TekMiL had a turnover of two million euros in 2012 and is firmly set on conquering the rest of the world.

Speaking to Australian Zoran Kanti-Paul is like speaking to a friendly volcano-slash-hurricane. The owner and chairman of language and cultural training company TekMiL is spewing forth the contents of his mind and heart – ideas and ambitions – at that impressive speed that characterises happy entrepreneurs.

Alvaro Luis Moreno Gonzales misses the warmth of weather and people in Venezuela – but loves his Finland-Swedish wife and newborn baby boy

What do you do here in Finland?

I’m a musician in three bands and a bartender at Pinella in Turku

When and how did you end up here?

My now wife was an exchange student in Caracas Venezuela. She said, ‘Come to Finland with me, it’ll be fun’. So I did in 2006. Last year we got married and 11 days ago we had a baby boy.

It is said the Irish are everywhere and that they know how to party. Of the 17.5 million living around the world, 491 are in Finland – this has doubled over the last four years. Like other minority groups they have come because of love and work that includes IT and software development and to teach English. There are some who have come on a whim: “Ach I just fancied something different”, as one lively fella recently told me over a pint of dry stout in one of Helsinki’s Irish pubs.

The University of Jyväskylä is putting science into the art, decoding how brains break down music.

If you get 12 people to discuss the same song, you’re likely to get twelve different descriptions and opinions. Finnish research at the University of Jyväskylä has been mapping what the brain is doing while listening to a song, and there have been surprises along the way.

In his book Not So Barren or Uncultivated: British travellers in Finland 1760–1830, Tony Lurcock presents the familiar figure of the Englishman Abroad in very unfamiliar terms. Travellers told of winter temperatures which froze brandy in the bottle, and of summer journeys when they were eaten alive by bugs and mosquitoes. There are now many more Brits living in Finland than was the case back then.