Sweater Weather

Greetings from Canada!

Last week has been full of sunshine and cold weather, and the temperature has been as low as -30 C, But of course, as a Finn I really don't give a shit about the cold ;)

By the way, Canada beat Russia in the U20 Ice Hockey finals and became the new world champion. Go Canada!

My first actual week as a student in Lakehead University has almost reached it's end, and here's a quick recap of what I've been doing.

The first week has mostly been getting to know the course outlines and how the school's internet systems work. For some reason I wasn't visible on any courses on Monday, but luckily it was easily fixed by dropping by the registration office. After that I also got my student card, which is used for various tasks such as identification, school gym, library and you can also buy a bus stamp to use on the card.

A view of the Agora, which serves as the main lounge for the university and most of the offices are located here.

I chose five courses, of which I decided to drop one (since the lectures were at 7 PM to 10 PM on Tuesday nights, no thanks!) and it was an elective course anyway. I also replaced one of the courses with something which is more relevant to my curriculum in Finland. So far the courses seem really good! My courses for the semester are Canadian Business Environment, Business Intelligence, Human Resource Planning and Business Presentations.

I was really surprised how deep into the topics the professors go into, and they really know the subjects. Textbooks are, pardon my french, fucking expensive. A new textbook usually retails for 100-200 dollars (that's around 70-150 €) and even the used ones, if you manage to find one, are quite expensive. Luckily I ended up not having to buy any of them, since the teachers had extra copies reserved for exchange students and I found one of the books as a PDF-file.

Took a photo while doing my homework at the university. Not a bad view, eh?

As I only have four courses in my schedule, it is quite easy, and for example my Fridays are totally free. On the other hand the amount of individual work is quite a lot bigger from which I'm used to in Finland, so it's good to have enough time off.

There's a lot of these fellas running around campus. I never have to walk to school alone when I have some little Bambies with me!

On Tuesday we went to The Outpost, which is a bar/nightclub located in the campus, with my roommate and his friend. There's a theme for every day: the best days are Tankard Tuesdays (when you can buy a 32 oz, or 1 L tankard of beer for 6,75 $, which is less than five euros) and Thursdays when there's a club night. Mondays are wing nights and Saturdays are country nights with live country music. The domestic beer here in Canada is not too bad, and to be honest it's not too different from US beer such as Budweiser, which is popular in Canada as well. Pricing of alcohol is a bit cheaper than in Finland, especially when it comes to bars.

On Friday I went to the international student orientation held by the LU International Office. We had a chance to meet up with other international students and various organizations gave us a lot of information about the local services and such. We also had a little competition, from which I managed to get a ticket to the VIP booth in a hockey game next Saturday against the UQTR Patriotes. I hope we do well! There's a game on Friday as well, and we're going to see that as well.

The orientation also included a city tour in an old-fashioned School Bus, and I managed to take a couple of pictures from the trip as well. Take a look at them below!

Why don't we have buses like this in Finland? They're so cute :D

The LU School of Law. Looks like Hogwarts to me.

Some older houses located in the most expensive area of the town.

A church. It's old. I don't know its name :(

On Saturday morning I went to do some Yoga. Yes, I voluntarily went to a Yoga class. And it was really lots of fun, and a totally new experience for me! After 1,5 hours of connecting to the earth and the heaven and stretching myself into different positions and releasing my inner energies and all that other yoga stuff, I went and did a workout at the school gym, which is by the way quite nice! The machines are of course a bit old, but they all work properly, and since I'm a morning-person, I was relieved to find out that the gym opens at 6 AM on weekdays! I'll try to get some photos from there at some point as well. There's also a swimming pool and a climbing wall at the gym, both of which I'm going to try out soon. The amount of sports and recreation available at LU is really amazing, and it's something that I wish the Finnish Universities had as well!

Me in a proper Yoga attire, happy as ever!

In conclusion it's been a great week. Despite the cold weather I've had some great new experiences, met new people and learned lots of new stuff! I'm looking forward to coming events such as the Chinese New Year, winter camping trip, skiing trip to Loch Lomond, dog sled riding and of course countless nights of drinking beer and having a good time!

As always, thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Yours truly,

Teemu

Täällä, tänään.

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