For our first meeting place we chose the famous waffle cafe called Tampereen vohvelikahvila. It was really nice to start the day with some delicious waffles and getting to know each other. It was really nice and easy to discuss with Chiara, Meike and Sofia and I feel like we covered many different topics, such as Finnish candies, drinking habits in Finland and Germany and the traffic jams that can be pretty annoying in, for example, Munich. I learned that getting driver’s licence is quite different in Germany because you have this “trial period” when you must avoid getting any “points”. You get points if you, for instance, get a speeding ticket or drive under the influence. You can also get points from running red lights on bike, which was quite surprising to me.
Additionally, we discussed Finnish vappu and Juhannus (mid-summer) and German Karneval a bit. I learned that many people in Germany are having a lent before Easter but not everyone is doing it for religious reasons. Some people might just want to challenge themselves and see if they can live 40 days without, for example, meat or sweets. My groupmates told me that “Aschermittwoch” is the day that starts the lent.
We were discussing mainly in English but I also taught my groupmates some words (like lake=järvi) in Finnish. I also learned from them when they didn’t know the English equivalent to some German word and ended up explaining it to me, which was really interesting ^^ I hope that next time I will feel more confident in speaking German, too. Regardless, I really enjoyed our meeting and I’m already looking forward to Monday!
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