First Impressions

Walking into the small one room airport at Tampere we were welcomed by a large sign saying 'Tervetuloa'. You are immediately put into a line into passport control and then get your bag from just about the smallest conveyer belt I’ve ever seen. From there we took a quick bus ride past little blue and red houses similar to those in Vermont to the centre of Tampere to catch a train to Jyvaskyla. At the station a woman overheard us say 'Jyvaskyla' and immediately started talking to us and asking where we were from and where exactly we were going and so on for the next three hours - an hour waiting in the station and and a couple on the train to Jvyaskyla. 80 years old with amazing travel experiences, including owning an orchard in Spain which she still harvests fruit for in the fall, within the first five minutes she invited us to her summer home for smoked salmon the Finnish way. We exchanged phone numbers on our Nokia mobiles and went our own ways upon arrival, but it was a wonderful welcome to this beautiful country.

The train ride lasted about about an hour and a half of train without much view since by this time it had gotten quite dark. If you put your face close to the window off in the distance you could see a light sky – but a rich deep blue– it was beautiful. A few twinkly lights here and there but really nothing else but the sounds of our voices and the train on the tracks. We got to the station in Jvyaskyla where Marika, the international student course tutor but also our good friend we met in the fall semester at Anglia Rusking during EMICC, and three others were waiting for us and hopped in a huge taxi for the ten minute ride to the student village. At this point it was about 1am and they had just come from the bars and we were full of mixed emotions of excitement and exhaustion.

Marika showed us to our rooms – Rachael, our British friend from Anglia Ruskin, on the second floor and Adeline and I on the 6^th floor just down the hall from each other. Adeline was also at Anglia Ruskin with me, though originally from France. She spent her last few weeks in Cambridge living with us, and now we are here together). There are two rooms, but my roommate seems to have gone home for a while. We share a small kitchen with a fridge, mini stove and sink and a small bathroom across from that on the other side of the entry hallway. The rooms are actually quite large and sparse (or 'naked' as one person said), spotted only with some orange curtains (necessary in summer when the sun doesn't set until after midnight and rises again at 4am), a desk, an old twisty office chair and what might be considered a bed but really amounts to a piece of wood with a mattress on top no thicker than the length of my thumb (update - my room is now spotted with two beds since Adeline moved in and an eclectic collection of Finnish postcards, pictures, candy wrappers and even flower paper because we could not bear the white prison walls!). As I went to bed, the sky was magnificently blue – similar to my description above but with some clouds added - and more like daybreak since actually, that’s exactly what it was.

The view out of my window is simple but nice… a small hill with beautiful fir and beech trees everywhere which create a wonderful jagged edge against the varying colours of sky. I am on the 6^th floor so I see over most of the few buildings in front and when (key word) the sun actually sets I get faint colours reflected on the clouds above so it's really nice. You can be assured that my first night I slept like a baby, surrounded by magical light and mystical trees... ready for my adventure to begin.