Erasmus to Seinäjoki

Internship in Finland

Hey Hey everyone ! I know it’s been a long time, but I was busy… doing my internship in Finland !

I know I’m kind of lucky, because in France, most of the other students are struggling finding a internship, but here, we (Romain and I, Clément also found an internship in an other company ) manage to find a company for our.

We were in River IR, a small company of 3 person, creating website and application. We had to write a report about a programming framework named “Flutter” and develop an application for smartphone to show its capabilities.

When you are French, working in Finland is very strange… We are use to work from 8 am to 5-6pm with a break of at least an hour to eat and the relation with our superior is often really cordial .

Here it’s complitely different : our CEO literally told us to come whenever we were woken up, we were taking at least 5 coffee breaks a day and we the lunch break was really short. We could leave when we were bored or had finish our daily task… We had no real supervision and were free to manage our assignment how we wanted.

In Finland, people believe that if you are happy and have all you need at work, you’ll be more productive. And that’s the case ! We were super excited to go to the company in order to continue our work.

Our collegues were also working from their cottage via remote work (it’s a pretty usual thing here). So sometimes, we were allowed to work from home.

A cottage (we went in hollidays in this one)

In the end, staying one more month to do our internship was a good choice and a great experience. I think we should change our vision of the work in France, and take some inspiration from our Nordic cousins. Working shouldn’t be a chore, but a passion, and we should all be happy to go working !

Thanks for reading guys and take care !

Goodbye

Hello!!! Hope that you are all good. Today is the end of our journey here. I hope you enjoyed being with us and that you learned new things about the Finnish with us.

It was a great stay some activities had to be canceled but we had a great time. We met new people, new American, Nigerian, Spanish, Turkish and Finnish friends. The culture, the friendliness of the locals was a good experience especially the coffee break. You have to see this beautiful country. I received an invitation from roommates to come back one these days. If one day you have to come to Finland you absolutely must visit Lapland and see the northern lights. And see the monuments Alvar Aalto and Seinäjoki and it’s frozen lake.

Take care and Nähdään!!!!

The lock-dow

Hello everyone!!! hope that you are all ok. I will share with what I have done during the past three months during the lock-down.

😅😅 Overall for me the life during the lock-down wasn’t different to my normal life. But it was little bit difficult some time. The most difficult was to be on time at he supermarket to get food and other stuff, if you were late the shelves would be empty.

These were the only times I went out. After shopping, once at home I spent time doing 2 things mainly outside the online courses.

I was playing an online game with friends around the world. We played League of Legends, which is played in teams of 5 each with a specific position. I was the top laner of the teams.

The second thing I did after playing was to watching anime. I love watching anime, and i watched a lot of good anime during the lock-down. I think I finished more than 50 anime in those months.

There were also calls with the family and friends.But This is how my days went during lock-down.

See you later!!

Art in All Its Forms

Hello everyone. Our stay in Seinäjoki is close to its end, and it’s time to summary our research on the subject ‘Art in all its forms’.

During our stay we talk about The Symphony Of Extremes, a typical Finnish song, and The Finnish anthem(s). To conclude this subject, we wanted to talk to you about other subjects.

Alvar Aalto

We studied Alvar Aalto in Finnish Language and Culture because he is very famous here in Seinäjoki. He is the architect who design the church, the town hall, the library and the theatre in Seinäjoki. All his buildings in Seinäjoki are known as the Aalto center. His work in Seinäjoki is so important and remarkable that the wooden plan of his work is exposed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Finnish folk music

One other surprise in our researches about Finnish art was the discovery of musical music instruments. Before coming in Finland, we didn’t know of the existence of the kantele and we decided to learn more about it. We can find two types of kantele. Small kanteles have 15 or fewer strings; traditionally, they have five horsehair strings. The concert kantele (see figure 2) has between 35 and 40 strings. This instrument has a sound of bells, close to the sound of a cittern. It is an instrument made of wood, even if in the Finnish mythology, the magician Väinämöinen made a kantele with the bones of a giant pike.

Figure 2: Koistinen 38-stringed concert kantele. Picture by P. Lenz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Concert_kantele.jpg

Discovering Finnish Art in Helsinki

Helsinki as the capital of Finland is a very interesting place to discover Finnish art. When visiting Helsinki, we can visit several art museums as the Ateneum Art Museum and the Luomus Finnish Museum of Natural History. Helsinki is also the perfect place to taste Finnish food with many typical restaurants.

We hope all the articles about art in Finland helps you to know a little bit more about this wonderful country!

FloorBall

Hello, it’s been a while since my last article!!!! there have been some concerns related to the current health situation. But now i am there and i will talk about a finnish sport.

First of all we have to note that many finnish sport are linked to hockey. And we have one of them: the floorball or in Finnish “Salibandy“. It is literally a floor hockey with some particularity. They won the world championship in 2018 and will host it this year.

I had the opportunity to attend training sessions for the Seinäjoki junior female team before the lock down.

It was training for a friendly match against another city. But we lost it and can’t rematch due to the lock down of city.

I hope that after this current situation they will play the second leg and win it.

Stay safe and see you soon.

Selim