Skip to main content

Swinging into School


Well, kind of. We had orientation three days this week and had a chance to meet our fellow LLEES classmates. The program is truly international with students from Taiwan, Germany, China, Korea, Greece, Basque, Bangladesh, Iran and Mexico. There are only twelve of us right now but there are two students from Ghana and one from Nigeria who haven’t been able to make it due to visa issues. Besides being international, the areas of interest vary a great deal so it will be fascinating learning about everyone’s thesis topics and professional experiences.

The inside of the cathedral
Life on campus has changed dramatically. When I first got to Turku, you would see a few tourists hanging around the cathedral, which is on the edge of the University of Turku and Åbo Academy campuses (there are three universities in Turku, the third is Turku School of Applied Sciences). Now the area has throngs of students walking to and from the city center to the universities. Coming from a university town, this is a familiar phenomenon but somehow it feels more festive here than it did back at home.

There have been many highlights this week: meeting my classmates, being able to show people around who are newer here than me, discovering the other university cafes so I don’t have to go to the one in Educarium all the time. But the biggest highlight has been discovering swing classes!

Swing hadn’t originally been on my radar but I ran into the Turku Swing Society’s stall at the University Opening Carnival and changed my mind spur of the moment. The first class was the same day so in the evening I trekked over to Tarmon Talo, a rather innocuous wooden structure pretty close to my apartment complex.

My first thought walking into the packed room was that I was the only one there who had significant amounts of melanin in me. It’s interesting because the only other times I have been so hyperaware of my race have been when I was in Japan and Korea. Fortunately, learning a new dance puts everyone on the same playing field so this feeling quickly went away.

Another thing to note was how very un-Finnish the atmosphere was. If you’re going to spend even a few minutes dancing with a person it’s best to be somewhat friendly. Of the 36 leads I danced with, I only learned two of their names but that’s a start. There also was the Finnish guy who turned beet red when I smiled at him. It was adorable.

The best thing was that I ran into some of these people while walking around campus during the rest of the week. We don’t know each other well enough to actually say hello but it’s nice to recognize faces in the crowd. Turku is starting to feel like home.

PS. Please know that I do read your comments, even if I don’t respond to them! Thank you for all of the wonderful feedback so far.

Love,
Avanti

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Necessity of Finland

Before I moved out of my apartment in my hometown and left for Finland, I decided to have a few friends over for dinner. It was a big deal because 1) I didn’t really invite people over 2) I decided to make Indian food, on my own. I was extremely nervous the entire afternoon and stayed mostly quiet while my guests were there. They had fun, which was my consolation, but part of me was glad when it was over. This dinner came to mind the other day when I invited almost everyone I know in Finland for Ice Cream Sunday (I was rather pleased with the name). The people I called were classmates in my program, from my Finnish classes, friends I have met at events; in other words, an odd assortment of people who didn’t know each other very well. This evening I was not quiet or nervous. Instead I felt in charge and poised. I knew what I was doing. There were two years in between these two parties. In the intervening years I came to Finland. I completed a Masters degre...
1 comment
Read more

Working Identities

The halls of a TC building where I must be a doctoral student It’s been a while since my last post. To be honest, I haven’t done much besides school work, to the point that the I no longer know what to tell people when they ask me what my hobbies are. Which also means I feel a constant looming pressure of knowing I live in a big city with a reputation for never sleeping yet I spend my weekends holed up in my room or in the library (and the occasional coffee shop). This is not to say that I spend all of my time doing doctoral work. I have found two outlets in the form of jobs that have enriched this semester in ways that I didn’t expect. One is at a preschool, the other is working at the Graduate Writing Center consulting students working on academic writing projects. After not working for two years, I had forgotten what it feels like to be part of something that allows for change that you can actually see. Teaching is always rewarding as you watch children grow and marvel...
Post a Comment
Read more

And so it begins!

Only 2 more days before I leave for my next adventure! Over these past couple of weeks, I’ve had a lot of questions and they’ve followed a general pattern. I thought this would be the perfect place to answer all of them at once. For the geographically inclined, Finland is far north right next to Russia. It is so far north that a fourth of the country is in the Arctic Circle. This means that this part of Finland experiences the midnight sun, when the sun never sets in the summer, and the polar night, when the sun doesn’t rise during the winter. The far north is also known as the Lapland. Turku, the city that will be my new home for the next two years, is in the southwest corner of Finland so my day and nights won’t be as extreme as the Lapland but it will be more extreme than what we experience here in the Midwest. My plane journey to Finland will be a total of nine hours, with a very short layover in Iceland. Once I land in Helsinki, I only have an hour-forty-minute lo...
2 comments
Read more