Hostel at the Olympic Stadium
I have settled in the hostel at the Olympic Stadium. Jet-lag is still in force, so I woke up at 5am to a room full of burly sleeping men. I questioned my own sanity in having let myself come here with a half-assed command of Finnish and no point of contact other than the prof Dr. Makkonen at Aalto, as well as having chosen a dormitory suite instead of one of the private rooms. Having no other outlet to express my bewilderment, I turn to blogging. You may be thinking I am blogging to boast about being able to have come through half the globe to this strange city. I would have liked to, eventually, but I am still disoriented, so this post is for complaining.
The Language
What I am up against with this LANGUAGE thing:
I reached my current command of French in the time-span of 1 year, and can converse in it comfortably enough. French is an easy language; it is in the same language family (Indo-European) as most other European languages, and shares much of the vocabulary with English.
I am expected to reach a comfortable command of Finnish in ~2 months. Finnish is a Uralic language, related to Hungarian, Estonian, Sami and random languages scattered around Russia,. Basically Hindi is closer to English than Finnish is to English and the language institute here prefers to make up native versions of names rather than borrowing the word itself.
Töölönlahti
Two walks around the hostel revealed a bike shop, a supermarket (Alepa) and a Chinese restaurant conveniently positioned, and also a nice inland bay, Töölönlahti. There is a park. In the park there are patches of bare rock which are quite nice to sit on. There is a winter garden I don't know the purpose of.
The Surroundings
The Finns seem to be avid bikers. The bicycle tracks are filled with them. I am considering this as a means to commute.
The Commute
Olympic Stadium to Otaniemi is ~7km. North Haaga to Otaniemi is ~9km.
There are direct buses.
I am going to figure out public transport today. Tip: by figuring out the public transport of a place, one mentally conquers it.
I have not yet gone around to get to Otaniemi, where the university is, but I hope I can mentally conquer that too.
