I’ve been to Finland since last September as an exchange student and now it’s time to let the world know how I like it here.
TL;DR: I do like it, go check it out yourself.
The beginning of starting something new is often filled with excitement and overwhelmedness.
It was the same for me after I arrived in Finland in the end of August 2017.
Coming from a summer filled only with work on my BSc thesis, all the activities were highly appreciated.
In the first two months there were new things I’ve never done before almost every week.
Starting with the orientation week, I visited the favorite place of the fins: The sauna.
With the “normal”, electrical ones located everywhere, to the wood-heated Sompasauna operated by volunteers at the cost of the Gulf of Finland, to some small sauna in a cottage somewhere in the Finnish forest on a lakeside, I’ve done the whole spectra.
One really starts to enjoy sauna in the Finnish coldness and the boost you get after going from sauna into the cold water makes it even better. It’s the perfect place for the normally not so appreciated small talk.
Here I learned all the basic Finnish curses and “hyvä löylyt”, which means something like “I like how you pour the water over the hot stones. I like the heat and steam”.
But the Finnish (student) culture does not only consists of going to sauna.
There is a wide variety of activities and for most of them everybody who wants to join can join.
This is something I consider better compared to my home university in Germany, where most people do there own small private things.
I went to Sitsits, a dinner party with more or less strict rules, where you eat, drink and sing a lot…..a lot.
I got my overall in the color of the physics guild(student association) white, on which it’s typical to sew batches from the different events you went to.
Every guild has its own color, so if there’s an event where everybody wears his/her overall you can easily see what they do and save this topic in a conversation.
Of course I also did some studies with the other exchange students and some fins.
They soon became good friends of mine.
We were traveling around and just doing stupid stuff together.
So I’ve been to Tallinn, Stockholm and Saint Petersburg, and always by ferry.
As the alcohol is so expensive here in Finland, people try to get a good deal in the duty free shops on the ferry.
When you see lots of people packed with palettes of beer, they’re probably coming from some sort of ferry.
All this trips where really nice, I guess I could write about each an own post.
We didn’t only go abroad, but also visited a little bit of Finland.
To mention two things, there’s a small national park in Espoo called Nuuksio.
As the weather in September was still quite good, we spend one night in tents there.
We did our own food at the campfire, where we also meet some nice Finns which shared some pancakes with us.
Here I got the first impression of the Finnish countryside.
Basically Finland is only forest and lakes, quite many though.
Below you can see our group attempting to make breakfast.
On an other trip we spend a few days in a cottage close to Mikkeli.
It is common here to have a summer cottage somewhere in the forest.
It went on like this most of the time and I made some nice experiences like participating in Slush as a volunteer. It is one of the biggest start-up events in Europe. After maybe two months the excitement of the beginning slowly vanishes and everyday life starts. You may get stressed out by school work and feel a little bit depressed because of the lack of sunshine, the shortest days have around 5h daytime combined with the always cloudy sky of Finland. But in the end all the ventures you keep on doing and the small new thing you’re still learning all the time compensate this by far.
That said, I really enjoy it here and am right now planing the next trip. This time to Lapland, where you can experience real coldness, snow and darkness. And maybe, hopefully some aurora…