Everything is going really well so far! School started on August 15th with an intro day, and the first full day was the 16th. On the 15th my host sister came with Greta (the other exchange student who is from Germany) and I to translate what they said in the auditorium before we moved to our homeroom classes and to show me the way there and back. This period I have Art, Music, English, French, Math, and once a week Sports and a computer class. So far, my classes have been going pretty well I think, I understand all of the material that we are doing, and I have someone to translate in almost every class so I know when I should be doing something. Math is a little bit annoying because I have to put a lot of the questions into google translate, which takes time to then type lots of unfamiliar words.
The school year is very different from Victoria, and it will take a bit of getting used to. The year is broken up into 5 periods, each one consisting of 5 regular weeks and one test week. In a regular week you will have all of your classes about 3 times, but the order will vary from day to day. There are eight courses that you can take in a period, and so if you have not taken a full schedule you will have a few empty blocks. I start school everyday at 8.15 with the exception of Thursdays where I have my first block free, so I start at 9.40. School ends whenever your last class does, so I end some days at 14.10, one day at 15.30, and some days at 16.00. I have four courses every day but some days I have an empty block in the middle. We have 10 minutes between each class, and there are no bells to signal the end of class or the start of the next, so you have to keep track of your break yourself. Lunch is 30 min, and is in the middle of class. At 11.50 the teacher will let people know and you leave your stuff at your desk, because you can't have your bags in the cafeteria and the classroom is locked so everything will be safe. Then everyone heads to the cafeteria where we get a free lunch that is actually pretty good. At 12.20 you have to be back in class for the block to continue and finish. On the weekend of the 18/19th my family went to Helsinki and stayed with my host dad's sister's family. We took my host sister to the airport and I saw two more of the exchange students from Canada which was nice! Then we walked through Helsinki and went to a fortress on an island called Suomenlinna. Construction was started by the Swedes in 1748. It is on an island off of Helsinki, and was a maritime fortress and naval base. Now there are a bunch of museums and you can go look around the whole island. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage site. For more information, the official website is www.suomenlinna.fi/en. My schedule is filling up pretty fast, and it is nice to be busy although I do hope that I will have some free time that I can spend with my friends or just not doing anything. In a few weeks my language courses will be started at a school the next town over, and those are two days a week. Alternating with that I will be going to the Rotary meetings every few weeks. I will also be helping with a scout group. They are a group of eight girls ages 9 and 10, and they meet once a week. I will be helping as much as I can with the language barrier, until later in the year when I can speak more. Last week I met a girl at my school who does theatre in Naantali, and it looks like I will be able to get involved with that. Even if I am not onstage, I can help out backstage and working with the sets. I am very happy about that as I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to find any theatre here. It was going to be one of the harder things to leave behind, so I am happy that I can have a new theatre family and be able to spend time there. I have also had my first rotary meeting now, It was last Wednesday and the district general for 1410 was there. Everyone was very welcoming and although I didn’t understand much I am glad I went, it was a very good experience. This weekend we went sailing. There were definitely some differences, some that I hadn't even considered that could be different. For example, it is a lot more shallow than where we were sailing this summer. We were sailing with 100+ ft (30m) most of the time unless we were anchoring, sometimes we got 1000+ft (300m) in the middle of channels. This weekend in the archipelago we had up to 50m (165ft) and sometimes more like 10m (32ft). And the islands were much flatter than in BC where I was sailing before. There were many many more islands here, as there are close to 50 000 islands in the archipelago, depending on your definition of an island. Thursday was Naantali's birthday. The town turned 575 years old! My brother is in scouts, and it was my family’s job to put up the flags. Unlike in Canada, the flags are only put up for special events, such as Independence Day on December 6th. We had a certain order the flags had to go up in. We started with the memorial for soldiers, then went to the city hall where there were five flagpoles, then another five by the harbour, then ending with the biggest in the park. We started at about 7.30, and the last one had to be going up at 8.00. After they were raised we took three steps back and honoured the flag by saluting. In the evening we took them all down, so we honoured the flag then took it down and folded it in a very specific way. They are folded around the blue stripe, and once they are completely folded you can only see blue. We take them down in the same order we put them up, and the last flag was taken down exactly at 21.00. My brother Lauri started pulling as the first bell rang, and it was lowered exactly as the last bell rang. On the evening of the 21st Sanukka hosted a welcome coffee for me. Greta had had one on the 19th already, and her mom also made me a cake. She makes stunning cakes! There were 22 people there, my family, Greta's family, our neighbours, two people from Rotary, a few of my friends from school, and some others. Sanukka made a lemon blueberry cake and a salty meat pie so there was lots of really yummy food. It was called a coffee because the Finns have coffee with everything. At birthdays, at baptisms, when with friends, with breakfast, after dinner, etc. They are the biggest coffee drinking nation, and the average Finn consumes 12kg of coffee a year. Even if you do not drink coffee you would still say that you are going over to someone's house for coffee because the chance of other's at least having coffee is high. I have posted some pictures here, and more can be found in the photos section. Hei! I have now been in Finland for eight days! After very long flights, I arrived in Helsinki to find out that there were 9 other exchange students on my flight from Frankfurt, which was nice because we could all be together while waiting for our luggage, and it was really fun to start to meet the others. We were all loaded onto a bus and drove for 2 hours to Karkku, which is the camp that we were staying at. We were in cabins mostly based on country, so the Canadians and Italians were in a cabin together. Everyone at the camp was so friendly and energetic (once we got some sleep), it was a lot of fun and I'm really glad we had it.
Our days started at 7:45 with breakfast, then we had an information session before our lessons started. We had 5 hours of lessons altogether, 2 hours in the morning, lounas (lunch), 3 hours in the afternoon, kahvi (coffee), then a lecture, then päivälinen (dinner), sauna/freetime/outdoor activities, iltapala (evening snack), and we were in our rooms by 22.30. The lectures were very good, we had three altogether. The first was on the Finnish way of life which was about how they are not very talkative, and don't have small talk, they like their space so buses are considered full even if nobody is sitting next to each other, and they really like saunas. The second was on a year in Finland, so the weather and holidays, and how they celebrate them such as for Easter the younger kids dress up as Easter witches and go around asking for candy in exchange for protecting your house from evil spirits. The last was on the school system. They start in päiväkoti (literally day home) as young as age 1. Then is esikoulu (preschool) when they are 5 or 6, it is only one year, and is right before school then properly starts in grade 1 when they are 7. They then have alakoulu which is grade 1 to 6. Uläkoulu is grades 7-9 and then they have the choice to apply to Lukio which is academic or ammattikoulu where you focus on the trades. After Lukio there is a set of final exams that one has to pass. The exams are Finnish (or your mother tongue), and 3 of either your second language, a foreign language, maths, and some sort of science or social science (chemistry, history, etc.). On Thursday we went into Tampere, as our first experience in Finland other than the airport and the camp with the other exchange students. My Finnish teacher challenged us to try to speak Finnish once, which I managed to do. A group of us went into a Hesburger (similar to McDonald's) and I ordered fries in Finnish! One girl and I went into a bookstore and it was very neat to see all sorts of books we recognized because of the author translated into Finnish. The whole week was incredible, it was super fun, but I also learned a lot in the Finnish culture, the language, and just things that I hadn't noticed before, like how different people who speak English as their mother tongue can sound, as there was one girl from Tennessee who had a pretty strong accent that I was friends with, and a few other from other places. On Saturday, we got to finally meet our host families. My mom, dad, and sister came to pick me up and we had lunch together, and then after we left we went for a walk around some nearby lakes. At first glance the forest is similar depending where you are because it is a mix of conifers and deciduous, but it is also quite different. There are lots of pine trees, which are very straight and can be slightly reddish. And there are spruce and birch. It is odd to be able to see so far through the forest, because I am so used to having a lot of undergrowth. I was so happy to finally be able to meet my family! And then today we went to pick up my brother who has been away sailing and camping for two weeks. It started raining though, so the first time I saw my brother he was running towards the building we were waiting in, and came in completely soaked, dripping wet. They are all so nice and Naantali is beautiful. They live in the old part of Naantali, on the top of a hill that overlooks the harbour, so from my room I can see the islands and harbour and the old stone church. I am having an amazing time so far! |
AuthorHi! My name is Katerina, and I am on exchange in Finland for a year! Archives
April 2019
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