A rainy and lazy Sunday

Today ... was a rainy day.
I slept looong and after a breakfast I left my room for the Kampii shopping mall in the center. I met my "German/Austrian group" at Helsinki Central station and together we passed through the shopping mall. That's the only thing you can do when it's raining outside like now.

Some pics of today:

If you'd like to compare prices ... good luck.

Yes, this IS expensive!

A nice bookstore at Kamppi mall. Here you get everything!

That one looks normal-priced.

Yeah, Simpsons, äh, Simpsonit

Shopping mall

Looking downwards to the square in front of Kamppi

5 storeys high

just in front of the mall

some flats right above Kamppi

just opposite of them, you'll get a lot of (fast) food. Kebab, PizzaHut and McDonalds *gg*.

We've found a candy shop (which we haven't looked for at all). Here you get ALL kinds of candies. Seems to be a Haribo store :P.

Going back home on this rainy day.

Today, Uncle Bens cooked for me. He offered me some tasty rice with Oriental Chili Mixed Sauce and a pot of green salat and dressing. He'll cook again for me, I think! :-D.

Settle in

After arrival I unpacked my two suitcases in my appartment (10,8 m²). Here we have a shared kitchen/bathroom and "living room" for 3 persons. My tutor Keke is finnish and one of my neighbours. My other neighbour arrived at midnight and is coming from South Korea. Quite an interesting mixture ^^.

What does my room looks like?
It's just basically equipt. There's a 80x200 bed, a large working desk, one office chair, one wheelchair and one normal chair. Furthermore I've a big (IKEA) wardrobe for all my clothings.
And of course the most important thing is the RJ45 plug for the internet *gg*.
Here I've some pictures.





The internet problem
One of the first things I did, was to plug in the network cable to my DELL laptop. I tried to connect to the I-net, but unfortunately I just got the welcome page of the broadband operator "Sonera". There I had to fill out an registration form and I got the information, that the connection will be manually opened by Sonera. So the only thing to do is to wait.
Yesterday, on Friday I was fed up of waiting and called their support hotline. The callcenter agent was very helpful and checked a few things and ... what a pitty ... about 30mins later it worked :-). I've been arround 36 hours without Internet. That sucks!
But now, I've a typical finnish internet and I'm happy about it.
Have a look at this:

Shopping
On the day of arrival we also went shopping to a near small supermarket, which is open 7 days a week from arround 9 a.m. till 9 p.m. That's great.
What I've seen there: The Finns have quite a lot of their own products which you don't know as mainland European. Of course they also sell brands we have in Austria, but not that much.
Furthermore, Finnland is EXPENSIVE! --> 1.5l Coke = EUR 2.20 | 350g Nestle Cornflakes = EUR 3.50 | 4x Danone Actimel = EUR 2.20 | One döner kebab = EUR 5.00 --- terrible.

For the first days I just bought something for breakfast, something to drink (I don't know why the don't have Vöslauer here, zzz) and, of course, Chocolate bars like Mars and Twix and so on.



Paying methods
You can pay by Maestrocard (Bankomatkarte) or Mastercard nearly everywhere. Here, you don't need your PIN, you just put your card through the machine and sign the invoice. And that even works at small temporarily market stands at the harbour. WOW!

Dinner
On the first day, Keke and I went out for "dinner" to a kebab restaurant arround the corner, for a kebab plate with fries ... something typical finnish, right? :-D.

That was my first afternoon in Helsinki :-)