What a Week

So this has been a rather long week. But its been great. I've discovered the more you put into life, the more you get back. Last night was my first night in, in over a week, so was going to blog, but ended up having an early night instead!

Here's a run down of each day/night;

Thursday; Went to an ice hockey match, as you may have read below

Friday; As you may also have read below, I went back to Helsinki for a birthday party. It was great to see so many old faces. Its strange to think how close I was to some of the people in Helsinki when I was only there a few weeks, and I've been in Turku for months, but wouldnt say I'm all that close to anyone here (yet). Was a crazy party, and that went on to the small hours, so definitely worth the trip back. And the cake was great :p


Saturday; The birthday boy (who kindly put me up for the night) took me to look around his university buildings (we couldn’t think of anything else to do, and it was a nice day so a pleasant walk). Its the Design faculty, so was an interesting building with lots of sketches and models that they have to make in the metal/wood-shops. After that we walked along the coast for a while then headed back to the city centre where we bumped into some more of our course-mates and all went for a coffee. Felt so natural to be back in Helsinki, but have since decided that although I miss the people and crazy partys of Helsinki, I actually prefer Turku as a town. Being a country girl, I've never seen the appeal of living in London, so maybe its the same for Finland.

Sunday; Slept a lot, hehe. Then we had a BBQ. It was raining but we did it anyway. It was with the language circle. There were about 6 of us, so not bad a turn-out considering the rain. We have a little bbq ‘hut’ of sorts beside our building, so that was fine. Was interesting talking to the Americans here actually. They are surprisingly nice, hehe. I've also found the language cirlce is a great oppurtunity to mix with Finnish students and get to know more about Finland. For example, the often joke about how we have 'snow days' in England - 'imagine having the day off school just because it snows!' I miss snow days, they were the best, hehe.

Monday; Bumped in a Hungarian I know on the bus home from work. (as you do, hehe). He invited me out to this pub that does a student price on Mondays. Called Bar Kuka. Its quite a cool place, with funky interior. And there was a huge group of Erasmus students along with a band playing. Good chilled out night.


Tuesday; Went out with the language circle again. Just to a little café in town where you can play board games. We decided to give scrabble a go, but its quite hard to play English scrabble with a Finnish set, because there are so many letters that they don’t have. Try using K’s when you don’t have any C’s. Harder than it sounds, but we managed to complete the board and use all the letters with (almost) no cheating. See the evidence (for those looking that hard, the vowels with 'umlauts' or whatever they're called, we used as blank letters so could be anything).


Wednesday; Two guys that I knew from Helsinki were visiting Turku for the day before heading onto Tampere. So I took them to Koulu. I really like that place and they seemed pretty happy with it. One guy is from Bavaria, and Koulu brew there own beer, so its stronger than most of the regular Finnish stuff which I’m told isn’t that good, so he was happy with the ‘real’ beer there I think. Although obviously still not as good as Bavaria. Personally I cant stand beer, but they do a great blueberry cider which I recommend.

Thursday; It still doesn’t end. My tutors ex-housemate’s boyfriend (if you can follow that) wanted to start a regular club night in town and it was the debut so my tutor had a pre-party to try and get a good group together. Its been an age since I'd seen her, and I like all her housemates, so was a good night. The actual club night was good too, with good music from the DJs and a live band (The Oders) which were trying so hard to be a British Indie band. Don't tell anyone I said this, but they were actually pretty good. Sounded like Placebo would have done were they part of the 80's electro era. Quite funky. Check them out here.

And that was my mammoth week. Dont think I'll have another like that in a while. It seriously messed with work on thursday - I made so many mistakes. It wasnt any better on friday, but because I knew I was tired, I took my time doing everything so didnt leave work till late (but didnt mess anything up!). Next week there will apparently be students in the labs with my supervisor running a class for them. Will be nice to see some new faces, and have a bit of life in the lab. Theres been a terrible flu going around, so lots of people have been away. However, I went to a seminar and got chatting with some of the people in the other labs. Seems there are some friendly faces around, and people are starting to speak to me in English, which is nice.