20.11
After 2 hours of sleep I rushed to bus and headed for Helsinki, enjoying the sun rise. An air plane took me first to Frankfurt and then I continued to Geneva in Switzerland. The language barrier started already in the airport when I couldnt find my bus and people couldnt help me, but after more than an hour I ended up in train station. I knew Geneva would be expensive, but man, I never thought that expensive! One small piece of pizza with water costed nearly 10€. Luckily I had brought some bread from Finland and survived without spending a single Swiss Franc. I managed to buy tickets to Grenoble and arrived there late in the evening. Everyone had gathered to get to know each other in Arthur's place and as I got there I finally got something to eat - a crêpes with chocolate! And something to drink as well, I dont know what was it but it tasted horrible and was called Charteuse. Luckily there was a variety of other drinks that had come from different countries - some of them even drinkable.
Unfortunately the evening didnt last too long because it was a Sunday night and neighbours didnt like 30 Estiemers having a party, so my host Thomas took me to his place. I got a short introduction to French driving style - it's crazy! We nearly killed one person, but the journey continued and he left his car partly in a middle of a street because he couldnt find a parking lot - "this is Grenoble!"- he told, and yes, I was really in Grenoble now! I lived in a commune of 4 guys with a German girl Maria, pretty unique experience!
21.11
I've been never so alert in an Estiem event before as I was this morning. My awarness rised to completely new levels when I saw the place I had arrived - MOUNTAINS, everywhere! Every direction I watched I saw only mountains, and at the top of all I saw the glistening Mont Blanc. Nice, I could handle living here for 3 days! As a breakfast we ate croissants and other sweet stuff- French style! First we were introduced to Estiem and had an Estiem questionary, which I won, yay! Next was the academic part, a great guy from HP, Pascal Marion, had come to talk to us about the topic "Crisis Management". And how interesting was that! This guy really had charisma. He told about 6 steps, starting from pre-crisis and ending to post-crisis. So a short glance of crisis situations in a company. I really enjoyed the lecture, one of the most enjoyable lectures in my life - partly for the interesting subject and partly for the amazing lecturer. Some more croissants afterwards and then we had a nother lecture about financial crisis. It was not as interesting but not the worst ones I've been, I did enjoy it. It's just that Im not exactly an economy student and especially the cases he gave us to read included some unfamiliar vocabulary. Both of those guys had amazingly good English skills for a French and I bet they have lived quite a long time out of France. Well, the last lecturer took me back to reality and the English sounded more like French, cute. We got a case about a crisis in NASA after a failed space shuttle launch (or a "lunch" as the lecturer pronounced it :P). For some of us this was the first case practice, so we did enjoy it. We realised it was already dark and we had been in the university for 11 hours, so they day was a lot more enjoyable than any day in my university! Succesfull start for a vision event. After the academic part we ate some great local food, Tartiflettes, and drank some French beer playing "Snaps". It turned out that Karl was incapable to count due to the pressure of the came (or the alcohol!). Finally we ended up in a small pub where was no one else than us, so we had a private pub and danced all night long. The French people proved they're a lot better dancers than Finnish!
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| Early morning in Grenoble |
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| Grenoble at night |
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| After winning an ESTIEM quiz I won a typical French hat! I love it! |
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| what else than.. playing SNAPS! |
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| After party |
22.11
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| Another early morning in Grenoble.. and the magnifient view - mountains, everywhere! |
After another early morning I was happy, that we didnt have any academic part that day. After we were introduced to the exchange and studying opportunities in the university we had lunch (food in French student cafeteria is excellent!) and then separated into two groups, one group went to the castle Sassenage and another to city tour. I went first to the castle, which was situated in a very beautiful place just in the root of a mountain. The castle visit was quite boring, the introducer didnt speak (or didnt want to speak) English so it was translated by Karl and Arthur. She spoke way too much about all the paintings which were not so interesting! When we came back it was already dark so the city tour wasnt as nice as it could have been, but I really like the city. After that we did some shopping and I did some great findings. Then I get lost and tried to find the university using a map of Lyon until I realised, that it's a wrong map. People didnt want to help me because I dont speak French so I was circling around for almost 1 hour until I suddenly found a familiar road and found the university!
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| The summer was ON! +18 in November, wow! |
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| LG Lappeenranta |
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| Castle Sassenage |
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| Grenoble in sunset |
Being late is not a problem in France, since everyone is late at least for half an hour. Next step was a nice dinner in a cute small restaurant "La Petite Idée". The food was really excellent - this is just turning into an eating holiday. After the dinner it was time for some bars - first was a Mexican style bar with sand on floor. We drank a couple of Tequila- drinks and Mojitos and headed for another one, which was one of the coolest I've ever been to - "La barberousse". It was like a small pirate ship with music too loud and table catching a fire every now and then. With the Grenoble- guys I bought a bottle of something yellow - drinks in this place are also very unique. So we danced again all night long until the owner asked us to get out. Thomas lived pretty far from this place so it was a good 45min night walk in completely empty streets! (Okay, it was Tuesday, not exactly a party day).
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| La Petite idé! |
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| After party |
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| After-after party... :) |
23.11
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| There's many ways to flush a toilet.. In Thomas' flat you can do it like this! |
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| The University - Grenoble INP |
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| I <3 Grenoble |
Needless to say - I was tired! But as a good motivation to wake up was the return of the great Pascal Marion. This time we dealed with the problem "Changing technologies" when companies have to all the time keep up with the technology development and, in best case, to be a step forward to the others. Again the lecture was very interesting.
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| Romans |
After lunch it was the time to leave for Lyon. On our way to Lyon we made a stop in Romans visiting Krohne (a German company producing measurement systems). There we met the production manager + few employees who were not aware that less than 50% of us understands French, even less speaks it! After recovering this shock they started to have their presentation in English. One of them was quite okay with English but especially the production manager's English caused a lot of difficulties. But still, how can I judge him, he was in his 60s and was not making any top-management decisions in international level, so for a French his English was very acceptable. We made a tour around the company to have an overview with it, and if I didnt learn anything else, I learnt why sometimes it's better to buy the components from China than from France (it's not a question about price, it's a question about quality!!).
Back in the bus and I fell asleep due to previous nights parties. In Lyon I was extremely hungry but eager for some campus party. They served us with some baguettes and excellent sausages. And then was the alcohol part.. Good wine - check, extremely small beers (but strong) - check, whiskey and vodka - check.. Of course I had brough a Finnish delicacy "Koskenkorva" with me (which is actually not more than a typical vodka). So we played Snaps, limbo, danced, sang... drank more.. sang more.. dance more.. then was the after party in a place I dont know, and an after after party (now I didnt know either the place nor the people).. And the same goes with the next morning when I woke up at 7, obviously not in a right place, and tried to navigate to my host's place which I, obviously, visited the last night, and found it after one hour! How glad was he to finally find me, having thought that I had been killed or something ;D (NB! This is not the kind of story you might think - this is just falling a sleep in after-after-after*x party!)
24.11
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| Work hard - play hard, yep, that's ESTIEM! |
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| Yes, we did also work. The academic part of this Vision was exceptionally interesting, I must say! |
Im not sure how many hours I slept, but I had only time to change my clothes (and I had lost my jacket last night) and then head for a lecture. Fighting to keep my eyes open I was confronted by the general manager of Krohne France, a remarkable man - Jasques van den Bosch.
He told me about a topic "Crisis, what crisis?". Well, I thought about the crisis that morning when I was wandering around the campus area, confused by the illogicality of the system (in one place was buildings E, H, I and K, but where the hell is the building J?? Almost 1km away, or so it felt!). But Jasques was talking about completely different kind of crisis, and he was damn good at what he was telling! After one baguette I had forgot my crisis situation. Thank god I was not the only one, few of us felt so sick they had to go back to bed to recover and the caretaker of the department had left a not that the whole department smells like Whiskey.. Anyway, we were divided in groups and we had to prepare a presentation about few topics, our topic was something like "How should and employee act in times of crisis?". We were pretty productive and innovative with our power point of pictures representing factors like "don't panic" or "think out of the box". Jasques told us some personal tips, which I will not reveal in public! ;)
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| I don't know how I felt all the time, "oh, this is SO French!". Being so overwhelmed by the "Frenchness" |
The next step was the city tour. We were separated in two teams and had to find places according to clues that were given. We also had to accomplish tasks liks "sing the estiem song" or "take water from the river" and so on.. In the beginning it was fun, but after 5 hours my feet just didnt enjoy the situation anymore. In the end of the day we finally reached to beautiful old town of Lyon and took a funicular to Fourvieré with an amazing view over the city! Not mentioning the amazingly beautiful Basilique, one of the most beautiful I've ever visited, from inside and outside. Looking down at the city it just looked so small, just like a lego city. And then after all, few million lives there. It was the time to return to the campus to get some food. I was already so hungry that I had to grab one croissant. Rejané had prepared a dinner for us in her flat - potatoes with some special melted cheese and again delicious sausages. Yam yam! It was nice to have finally a relaxing evening after all the running around.
But the evening didn't end up so peasefully. We decided to go to night club where was actually an ESN erasmus party that night. The place, Boston Café, was so full of people that we could hardly walk. Drinks were also rather expensive. We spent there a couple of hours until I was almost falling asleep and had to return to the campus. The bus was as full of people as the club!
25.5
Again morning lectures. One lecturer from the university had come to talk with us about "Economical Intelligence", what ever it means. We found this approach rather too philosophical - c'mon, we're engineering students, not humanists! Anyway, now we for sure know what means "serendipity" and use it in our future career which will make us better persons (btw this is ranked top 10 hardest English words to translate, and we learnt it in 1 hour)!
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| "Drinking is illegal especially by the riverside and will be fined" - Yep, but we're ESTIEMers and we do this |
Next step was something I like - wine tasting! We had a real professional teaching us wine tasting. Now I can tell where the wine comes from (hypothetically) by rotating the glass and gargling the wine in my mouth (without spitting it off!). Few of us (especially the Finnish!) were angry for the ones who threw the left-over wine away so we decided to drink all the left-overs. So the wine tasting turned into wine abusing! I found my favorite and bought a bouttle. This amount of alcohol made us hungry, so we started to hunt a cozy bakery to eat a baguette. We didnt find one, so we end up in a dirty and suspicious kebab bar, where the bar tender didnt speak any English. Without more like 10 glasses of wine I wouldnt have entered that toilet - it was in the end of a narrow, stinky, dark tunnel. It was just as small, stinky and brown as I expected. (BTW there is one thing in French building style I dont understand - why to doors always open INSIDE?? For example, the tunnel was so narrow that the door could open only partly. This inconvenient also coused that I had difficulties to get out of the small toilet! How is it for big people, can they get out at all? Just wandering..) I ended open ordering a pita with French fries (??) because no one understood English.
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| Weird food in a dirty and weird place |
After changing our clothes it was time for a gala dinner. The restaurant was really cold and of course we had put our neat small dresses! Anyway, the food was excellent. And the wine. After party was in La Voile where was only few in addition to us, music was way too loud and drinks were way too expensive (a beer 6€, a vodka with coke 10€, what?!). We danced there until 2 and then I walked home without shoes, it was definitely a wrong decision to take high heels! And I had to walk over 2 kilometers. In a bus a faced a cute hitting attempt from a German Erasmus student, who wrote in his address book as a name "the hot blond behind me" and gave it me to add my numnber :D I did not, but it was still pretty creative!
26.6
Last night and I can feel it in my bones! We had a final discussion about the topics and my group made a summary of some lectures and had a presentation. Last thoughts included the word "serendipity" plus many of us miss Pascal Marion. We went to ice skating which was pretty funny thing - many of us couldnt even stand on ice skates while the Finnish were skating around like professionals (no wonder, we had ice-skating lessons 2 hours a week every winter in elementary school).
After ice-skating we desperately needed something warm. So we went to the christmas market and bought some vin chaud = hot wine! Just as I and Karl got a huge cup in our hands, the others decided to go to cafe, so we had to drink our vin chaud extremely fast! This caused such a warm feeling that after a hot chocolate we decided to drink another one (not as fast!). Then we ate again some excellent food in a romantic small restaurant in old town. With one, of course. We had scheduled a pub crawl after that but it was pretty impossible to accomplish because all the pubs were so completely full that a group of 30 couldnt fit in any. Finally we found a nice place where we were entertained by a half-naked French group and we enjoyed 3 liters of whiskey with coke. Afterwards we went to the same night club we had been few nights before and it was just as full as before! We ended up playing some stupid games in a table and amusing the Frenchies around us. And it lasted and lasted and lasted until it was so late there was no more busses going (or so early, I would say). We took a metro (without a ticket, of course) to a closer station just to notice the first tram will go after an hour. So, after all the calories I had gained during the previous week, it was time to walk the rest 2 and half kilometers! Not too bad, it was only 6 o clock when we arrived "home", I had even 3 hours to sleep before I had to wake up and start my journey back to Tampere.
I had even so much energy, that I decided to do a city tour in Genevé. The biggest problem turned out to put my luggage in a locker! I needed some local cash, how inconvenient it is to be in non-EU- country! In money exchange they didnt want to change such a small amount of money so they asked me to go to ATM. Then I had a problem how I could brake this paper money into coins! The locker costed 6Fr, so I bought a Swiss chocolate which costed 11,5Fr, so this left me 8,5Fr. With my coins I went happily to the locker just to notice that my suitcase is too big for it and the bigger one would cost 9Fr, and I had only 8,5Fr! I tried to beg 0,5Fr but no one spoke English. I did not want to give up and take another 20Fr, so I decided to empty my suitcase so it would get a bit smaller and fit in the small one. And it did! I managed to put my empty suitcase and all the clothes in the locker and even close it. But then I faced another problem... I had a 5Fr coin and the biggest coin it can take is 2Fr! Crap, crap, crap, just when I managed to put my suitcase there! I decided to take a risk and leave it unopen while I try to brake my coin into smaller coins. It was not that easy since not so many spoke English. Finally I managed to do it and my stuff wasnt stolen yet AND I MANAGED TO CLOSE THE LOCKER!
And so I was happy and donated the rest of the money for a violist playing Mozart in the poshy, expensive streets of Genevé. All the 10 hour journey to Tampere I slept perfectly. Reality struck me when I had to pull my suitcase in 0 degrees, wind and rain, and finally 5 o clock in the morning reached my own bed. It was a hard trip but what else can I expect! Altghough I enjoyed the Vision in Luleå more (even I was in fever and it was damn cold), it was still pretty good experience!
In High Estiem.
