Words

Comment to this post, and I will list five things I associate with you. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your blog (or just add a reply back at me). Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

These are the words I got from Anna:

1. Baking

I’ve always liked baking. We’ve got lots of pictures of me as a little kid ”helping” my mum bake rolls and buns. At high school I took all the cooking classes I could, and always volunteered to be the baker of the group. These days I don’t bake as much as I’d like to, mainly because of all the dishes I have to do when I’m done, but I still like baking every now and then. Most of my friends have had the pleasure of trying my family’s famous mud cake, which takes you to Nirvana at the first taste.

2. Finlandssvensk (Swedish-speaking Finn)

Being part of a linguistic minority was never anything I thought about until I went to a Finnish uni. First there was some hassle with points before I even got in, and when I did, I realised that I’d been taking my language for granted until then. I also noticed that to people at my uni, I was very finlandssvensk, while my friends from school had probably always looked at me as being slightly more Finnish than them. But I also feel more finlandssvensk when I’m surrounded by Finnish speakers, and I have recently taken to play the finlandssvensk card to get out of things, for example, which I had never done before.

3. Shoes
The first thing you see when you enter my flat (in Turku) is a bookshelf full of shoes. Enough said.

weheartit

4. Turun yliopisto / University of Turku
I started at the Uni of Turku in September 2008. It is the only university in Finland where you can major in French translation and interpreting, the only uni in Turku where you can study translation (properly, anyway), and it’s in the city where I wanted to live, so it was the only uni I considered going to. I really like my uni, especially our little corner of it, and after having spent a term in another university I realised just how well everything works at the University of Turku.

5. Exchanges

It used to be “When I was on exchange...”, but since last fall, that doesn’t really work anymore. My first exchange was a Rotary Youth Exchange year in France, and my second one was a term on an Erasmus exchange in London. Both were great, but very, very different. At the moment I still have about three years of studying to go, so there’s definitely a possibility of me going on exchange again. We’ll see...