Well it turns out I was right. In my last blog post I mentioned that I was coming to the realization that sometimes the best experiences are the ones we least expect, and my first week in Finland has proved that to be absolutely true. From meeting incredible people, to crossing viewing the Northern Lights off my bucket list, any sense of regret or sadness for not being able to go to my initial country of choice has vanished.
3 flights and 1 bus ride after my last post, I arrived in Oulu and met my kummi (Finnish for “godparent”) at the bus stop across my residence. While I was initially a little concerned about my building, given that it’s the farthest one from campus (for UW students think CLV), I’m really happy with how things turned out. I was the last to arrive to my three person suite and met my roommates: Estefania from Mexico and Silvia from Italy! After a quick trip to the grocery store and some floor socializing, I hit my bed exhausted.
The next two days I walked to and from campus and fell in love with the 3km path. In Oulu, many of the bike and walking paths are right in the middle of the woods. While they look a little scary at night with all the fog, they are absolutely beautiful when there is light out. The two days after I arrived were mostly full of orientation events focused on finishing off administrative paperwork and learning to live like a Finn. Finns tend to be very reserved and straight faced which has been a little strange for me thus far given that I’m used to smiling at everyone and getting smiles back. It’ll take a little getting used to but maybe I’ll adopt the culture myself. During one of the orientation presentations I heard the following quote which really resonated with me:
Exchange is not a year of your life, it’s your whole life in a year.
I’m trying to keep this in mind every day and really pushing myself to take on all the opportunities I can.
In the evening we went to an event organized by Oulu’s ESN (Erasmus Student Network) chapter at a nearby pub/club called Caio. It was a great chance to meet other people, and I even met some students studying Industrial and Management Engineering from Italy. It seems like Finnish nightlife culture, similar to that of Europe, starts quite late. Preparties go on until about 11:30pm and people head to the club at 12am, with parties lasting until almost 4am. While we got home “early” at 3am, waking up for more orientation events the next day was tough.
After orientation sessions my roommate and I checked out some stores like Tokmanni, the Finnish version of Target. While grocery shopping is a huge struggle since everything is Finnish, I’m actually starting to feel pretty glad that I ended up in a country where everything isn’t primarily in English. It’s given me a great chance to learn a new language and interact with locals to complete basic tasks like buying milk. For those interested in Finnish, some of the new words I learned during my little shopping trip were sika which means pig and kana which means chicken.
That night my floor mates were saying that there was a high chance of seeing the Northern Lights. There’s a cool app called My Aurora Forecast that tells you the likelihood of viewing the Aurora Borealis based on your location. We spent hours sitting outside on the balcony on the highest floor of the building waiting for the lights, and I’m so glad we did. At one point the white coloured waves turned green and we could see the lights pretty clearly. Seeing the Northern Lights has always been on my bucket list, and it was pretty cool to be able to see them so clearly from my apartment in Finland. Turns out Oulu has it’s perks after all. The icing on the cake was also seeing a falling star. I definitely went to bed that night so thankful for this chance to spend four months in northern Finland.
Given the eventful Saturday my roommate and I decided to take it easy and sleep in Sunday morning. With my jet lag and three days of continuous activities I was pretty happy to stay in bed a couple extra hours. After a late start to the day I spent time walking around the city centre with one of my roommates. The city centre is like the downtown of Oulu and features a mall, waterfront, and lots of little stores. The quaint little area is only about 3km from my residence which is pretty convenient. The city centre is also the home of Toripolliisi also known as “The Bobby”. The sculpture was made in 1987 to honour the bobbies (constables) that used to patrol the market place. After roaming around for a couple hours we went to Nallikari beach to watch the sunset.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were rather uneventful primarily due to the start of classes. At the University of Oulu academic terms are four months and each term consists of two periods. I’ll be taking 6 classes here, 5 of which are equivalent to the courses I would be taking back home, with the additional class being a language course. This period I’ll be taking Optimization, Towards Data Mining, and Survival Finnish, while next term I’ll be taking Simulation, Human Computer Interaction, and Software Engineering Management, Measurement, and Improvement. I spent my days either in class or exploring the campus. During the evening, my floormates and I cooked dinner together. Each night we would cook something from one of our cultures. So far we’ve made some pretty good Greek and Mexican food.
Although I’m taking Masters level engineering courses, my schedule is pretty open — I even have Thursdays and Fridays off. I spent Thursday taking it easy and dealing with some other housework. I also bought a bike since it’s easily the most convenient way to travel around Oulu. I concluded my week by joining a rehearsal with Teekkaritorvet. The wind band was originally founded by tech students at the University of Oulu in 1970, but is now open to all students. It was so much fun to play trumpet in a band again and it was really interesting to experience Finnish band culture. The most interesting thing to me was that students drink alcohol during rehearsal. While this is awful for their instruments, they all believe it’s key to having a good time while playing. It was a really fun experience and I’m looking forward to being part of the band this term.
All in all my first week in Finland has been a busy and fun one. I already feel settled in here and am really looking forward to all that’s in store for me ahead. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading or kiitos (Finnish for thanks)!
-Pallavi