Moi, mun nimi on Daan (Hi, my name is Daan)

Monday’s still are pretty much the same as back in Belgium. You have to wake up to early, and you forgot to buy milk and cereals, because you were in a party mood all weekend and didn’t go to the supermarket, so there is nothing to eat… The good thing is I survived the weekend and I was really looking forward to our first Finnish lesson. After a few minutes I realized, that learning the language would be even harder than I imagined. You can’t relate to any language and it’s really hard to pronounce any word at all. The teacher didn’t speak English very well, so that makes it even harder to understand anything at all! But we did enjoy it, and a Spanish guy trying to pronounce the Finnish “J” as in “Javier”, is pretty funny as well.

Erasmus people hanging out

Warming up for footbal game

Italian pasta and sausage

The best thing here in Jyväskylä is that you’ll never get bored. Every single day someone throws a party or organizes an activity. Last week for example on Sunday we gathered to play some football and eventually we ended up playing against a local Finnish children’s team.
This week we also had an international diner. But because we can’t make any French fries here and you can’t find any high-value Belgian beers in the supermarkets, we decided to arrive an hour late (typically Belgian!) and just bring some chocolate.
Last weekend we went to bar Ruma (literally means “Ugly”), and for the first time I was surprised that they do know some good music around here as well. And not only the commercial dance and RnB. Afterwards we ended up at the Italian’s place, where he started to make a late-night pasta meal for 8 people.

Finnish nature on way to supermarket

Last week we didn’t have a lot of courses yet. Monday and Tuesday we still had a day off, and when we arrived at school on Wednesday at 8am, we discovered that our teacher was sick and that none of the exchange students got informed about it. The course that we were going to take on Wednesday afternoon, “Safety & Security”, got cancelled for the whole semester because not enough students enrolled for it. The first real lesson we had was the “Sports marketing and mass media”. After the introduction we realized that it was not going to be so much about the sports itself but more the commercial side and even how politics are involved in all these major sporting events. Next week we’re going to start with “Visual communication” and “Basics of wine and other alcohol beverages”, which I’m really looking forward to!


  
 Moikka! (Finnish way to say goodbye)

ps: a quote to end with
Spanish guy saying: "Alcohol is so expensive over here, I started trying to drink these cleaning products we have."