Conclusions of our first week in Finland

Our first week here has already finished, so I am going to tell our first conclusions about the country and the job.

Regarding the country, the little we have seen let us know that there is a great difference with Spain. The public transport works perfectly. They are punctual (if the arrival is at 14:16, you arrive at 14:16), and there are travels every minute. Moreover, with the same travel card, you can use the train, the underground, the tram, the bus and even the ferries that go to the Suomenlinna fortress.

Central Railway Station

The means of the high school where we are on Erasmus, the Helsinki Business College, are like the ones in the Spanish Universities, if not better. It is a six floor building with three cafeterias, a gym, an indoor soccer room, basketball and volleyball fields, saunas, and a medical centre with three nurses just in case the students or the teachers may have problems. The high school even has a museum of typewriters of the 20^th century. Here, they invest in education, they don’t reduce.

The society is a mix of cultures, ethnic groups and urban tribes. I say it is a mix because they are not split up like in other countries. The people here are very polite and kind when they address other people, but they are more distant than us. If you come across someone in the hall, they don’t say hello, and they don’t say goodbye to the shop assistant after finishing a purchase.

At Elisa Oij

Regarding the job, the treatment and the conditions are great. We have flexible schedules and the possibility of remote working. We can take lunch every day, paid by the enterprise, in the restaurant they have in the ground floor: a complete buffet. The second day, they gave us a mobile with free calls and unlimited internet connection.

The restaurant

The only bad point may be that the job we have to do is more like the one of an analyst than a programmer, we have to be in touch with the end user of the enterprise’s application to know how to improve it and propose new changes to the programmers. We have never done something like this, not even had the experience as a programmer, so we don’t know how to manage these works. Moreover, no one guided us the first days. We have done what we considered better. However, we are waiting to see how it will be the next week.

Helsingin tuomiokirkko

Finally, we have not forgotten visiting the emblematic places of the city, so we spent the whole Saturday visiting some of them. But, anyway, we still have two months to visit many other places.

Orthodox Cathedral Uspenksi.

Kind regards. Marcos Moyano Reifenrath.