Week the Second

Over the course of my second week in Finland, I finally bought some actual furnishings for my room. Although the extent of those furnishings include only a rug, a couple pillows, and a blanket, it has made the room feel a lot more comfortable. As I picked up the aforementioned items from a secondhand store, I decided that I would rather ride the bus home instead of walking 45 minutes to get there. As I was riding the bus, I ended running into a couple of other students who live in the same building complex as me! One of them invited me to a party that night and I decided to join, given that I had nothing better to do.

I ended up making a bunch of new friends there that I have been hanging out with pretty much every day since then. As the party was winding down, a couple of people threw out the idea that we could head to a club in the city center. Having never been to a club before, I decided to join! It was a ton of fun. Also, pretty much every bar and club here will give you a student discount when you are ordering drinks, which felt absolute surreal the first time I heard about it.

A couple days later, on Sunday, I was having a nice chill day. Around 3:30, I glanced at my phone and noticed that some people in one of the group chats I am in were talking about getting together and playing soccer. I absolutely love playing soccer so this caught my attention. Slight hiccup though is that I did not bring any of my soccer gear from the home and they were planning on starting at 7. So I quickly googled where I could buy soccer gear and then proceeded to walk about 2.5 miles to buy soccer gear. I made it to the store just before they closed, quickly bought some stuff and then walked another 2.5 miles home, rested for about 30 minutes then went and played soccer for an hour.

Then began my first actual week of classes. My first class began at 8am on Monday and by about 8:30, I realized that this class was over my head. I later realized that it was a masters level inorganic chemistry course... yeah, no thanks. Fortunately, I met and befriended a chemistry major in the class who recommended a much easier chemistry course for me to take, which I checked out and found to be more so on my level.

My next academic experience was not until Thursday, where I went on a field trip to a nearby (about an hour bus ride) national park to study the peatland (swamp) biology and hydrology. It was very interesting and very fun but also very tiring, we were walking around in mud that came halfway to your knees for about 6 hours. Upon returning back to campus, I joined up with some friends for a new student orientation event, which was loads of fun!

I spent almost all of Friday in the lab analyzing the many of the samples that we gathered on the field trip. Finnish class schedules are weird, but I think I kinda like it.