Greetings from Munich, Germany!
I arrived in Munich on 1st of September and now I’m writing this post in December. Time has flown by so fast! I’ve spent almost four months in Munich and gotten to know to many interesting people and places. By far the best part of the exchange has been the people. You get so many new and different perspectives of thinking about the world while abroad. It’s always a bit cliché, but I’d say that exactly this thing has happened to me when staying outside of my home country for so long now. And I would’ve considered myself as an open minded and objective person even before this semester. I strongly recommend to everyone spending some time outside of your comfort zone and exploring the world.
I study civil engineering in TAMK and during the exchange I’ve studied courses from different engineering fields, German language and two cultural courses. I’d say that in most of my courses here the teaching methods are more old-fashioned and somewhat conservative compared to Finland. There are luckily a few exceptions, but in general I feel like Finnish schooling system outperforms German in many aspects. Also, in everyday life one can feel the societal difference here; titles and ranks matter and emails must be written in a very formal way, for example.
In my free time I like to hang out with my new friends that I’ve gotten here. I’ve visited many bars and restaurants, biergartens and famous beerhalls, museums, BMW Welt, Dachau concentration camp and many more.
While staying here I’ve explored Munich and Bavaria, traveled to Austria many times, and traveled to Jordan with three friends. I’ve absolutely fallen in love with the natural beauty of the Alp-regions in southern Germany and Austria. and I still have a couple of travel destinations on my bucket list for the rest of the exchange, such as Netherlands and Berlin. Hopefully Covid restrictions won’t mess things up too much in January.
Overall, the exchange semester has been a wonderful opportunity so far and, in the future, I’ll appreciate more the good things in Finland.
Innsbruck, Austria
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