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

Holding Sand

 My mother once gave me the sound advice to avoid holding tightly onto things (she was specifically talking about people at the time) because if you do, they have a habit of slipping away. She did this through a marvelous metaphor that went like this: If you have sand in your hand and make a fist, the sand begins to fall out and you are left with less sand than you started with. If you gently cup you hand and let the sand come in however, it remains in your hand, and you can perhaps even add more. This metaphor has stuck with me because it helped me with the problem that I was having back then. But I’ve come back to it again and again and slowly been realizing the smaller and more subtle ways that I grab onto things. These things are now always visible or tangible, but they still have important implications. Take meditation. I meditate every day. It’s like brushing my teeth, I simply can’t skip this part of my day. But unlike brushing my teeth, which is a methodical and easy ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bagel perfection

Two weeks ago, my husband and I tried making bagels. This wasn't because of some sudden ambition on our part or a particular fondness for baking (though I do like baking if it involves dessert and he is our designated bread maker). It came out of necessity because he has been missing the bagels in NYC that we bought from the local grocery store whenever he visited. We would eat them for breakfast lathered with cream cheese and veggies. They are however, apparently not a thing in Finland so our only option was to make them ourselves. Bagels, in case you don't know are notoriously difficult to make. I knew this. He brushed my doubts aside and said happily "Let's try." Bagels take a day and a half to make. You make the dough, let it rise, shape them, and then let it prove for 12-24 hours before boiling and then baking them. We didn't have some of the ingredients, starting with the right kind of flour. My husband said it didn't matter and powered through. Aft...
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