First week impressions - the Finnish peculiarities.

©Daniel Frolov

Well, it has been a week. Classes just started after two days of various talks,

explanations, tours and other stuff. For now, we had a whopping total of... 1 class... But

otherwise it has been great. We explored the city, although it doesn't offer much in terms of touristic attractions, at least we saw a lot of shops! But the most interesting part is probably the landscapes and the scenery. Snow has a thing that makes everything way more beautiful and charming. Wherever you look it appears as if straight out of a fairytale.

While walking and exploring Seinäjoki, we started noticing some patterns and other recurring elements, which inspired this post.

The first couple of singularities specific to Finland were found in stores. Although surprisingly enough they don't have a lot of fish and meat (and it's quite expensive at that), they have an incredible amount of sausages. Whole aisles are full of sausages: hard, soft, pork, beef, chicken or mix... Every imaginable sort exists here. Even dogs have their own sausage section!

©yelp.com

Another widespread product here are jars of proteins. It can be found EVERYWHERE. In grocery stores, in the LIDL, in the department store, even the student cafeteria has protein bars!

What can also be found everywhere is games. More specifically money machines (similar to ones in casinos). In a similar fashion, they appear in grocery stores, in malls, at the railway station and in nightclubs just to name a few.

©europeangaming.eu

This, combined with high prices on alcohol piqued our interest on whether Finland had a poverty problem, which will be one of our research topic.

On the other end of the spectrum there are a lot of pretty expensive cars such as BMWs, Audis and Mercedes.

Finally, and most importantly, although they can sometimes come off as a bit cold, Finns are extremely welcoming and nice! They're always glad to help. It was clear from the first couple of hours following our arrival to the Helsinki airport.

©Daniel Frolov

There are, many other cultural items that can be notices of course, such as puukko knives found in most stores, but these have been some of the most striking to us.

This trip is off to a great start, and we're very excited for what's to come!

-Daniel