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Last photo with Cervantes

This is the last post of year 2010. I have picked five posts which I like and are worth reading from all my previous posts.

1. Exchange report is a summary of my exchange year in Spain and gives overview of it
2. I made a post how to get started with your exchange year. I hope that this post encourages people to learn a new language.

3. In my opinion Finnish people do not show their feelings as openly as Spanish. This post explains how I see it.

4. My father said that I should not have even published this post but I think that it is funny.

5. Here you can see the video of my team UHK Madrid playing in the floorball final.

I picked just five even I could have picked more but I have to draw line somewhere. It would be nice to hear which are your favorite posts.

Cooking oil

Spain is a big producer of cooking oil. Spanish people use a lot of olive oil and sunflower oil for cooking. You can find even five liter cooking oil bottles in the supermarket which cannot be found in Finland. Finnish people use canola oil for cooking but Spanish people do not use it because in the 80's there was a big tragedy. Over 1000 died and 60 000 got poisoned because of canola oil which was accidentally produced to be toxic and sold for consumers.

Sunflower seeds

Spanish people enjoy to eat sunflower seeds. Peeling them is one part of the fun because they actually prefer to buy seeds which they have to peel by themselves and they do not buy the already peeled seeds. There is some salt added to give you some taste when cracking the peels with your teeth. In Finland you can find sunflower seeds which are meant for birds in the winter time but the people do not eat them.

Christmas holiday

The first semester ended in Finland and that means Christmas holidays. I could notice in the student restaurant today that most of the students had gone to their home cities because it was more empty than normally. Today I came to Kuopio to spend my Christmas here.

Social media

I have been living now a bit more than three years watching very little television. In Finland I do not have a television and in Spain I had a television but I barely watched. it. I am not reading printed news paper or magazines regularly but I read something printed still few times in a week. I listen radio only in the gym and in a car which I do not even own. To conclude it seems that these traditional marketing channels do not reach me.

Now the importance of marketing in social has been highlighted and it makes sense to me. When I think that how I got an idea to ask certain book for Christmas present (by the way I have not asked any other Christmas presents) and how I got an idea that it would nice to have an electronic book reader. I got these both ideas from blogs which I am following regularly. I am using Internet a lot and getting information about new stuff from these social media webpages. Feels like that I am completely ignoring marketing from these traditional channels. Maybe I have not ignored it completely but at least social media effects me already much more.

Eviction cancelled

Last Thursday I wrote that few students got evicted from their flat. Finally the student housing company decided to cancel the eviction because the tenants made a complaint. The housing company claimed that police had a list with the names of tenants because they had been disturbing before. It revealed that the police did not have any list and that housing company had invented it. The police did not even stop the party during the night which caused the eviction in the first place. I wonder why the housing company wanted to kick the tenants out. The next night police came to another party and the host of this party did not get even a warning letter. I thought that in Finland organizations tend to follow the regulations but this case does not make much sense.

Brands

When going to a new country you do not necessarily find the brands what you can find in your home country. When I had to do grocery shopping in Spain mostly I had to choose between unknown brands for me. Always I ended up buying the cheapest product which is a white label. I did not even try the more expensive ones because I was happy with the quality of the white label products. Spanish people even called some products with the name of the brand because those were so well known among Spanish people. For example Spanish people calls cocoa with Cola Cao and handkerchiefs with Clinex. Both have also a correct Spanish translation which are cacao and pañuelo but people use a lot the names of the brands.

Kicked out

The student housing company of Joensuu kicked out three tenants this week because of making too much noise. Housing company did not give a warning letter before sending a letter to move out in seven days. All the tenants were kicked out because the contract says that everyone in the flat is responsible for the party if it is arranged. In this case all the tenants were not in the flat so they got kicked out even they were not participating the party.

Exchange program meeting

Last week we had a meeting with a Campus Europae representative and one another Finnish student who had been in Campus Europae exchange in Hamburg. We were the first Campus Europae exchange students from our university. We discussed about difficulties and good sides in the program. Bad things were that coordinators of our university did not know much about the program. Therefore we had to look for the information by ourselves in the Internet. In Hamburg was not offered a long language course like in Spain. We can though recommend the program because it offers better possibilities to learn a new language and I am planning to use the option to take a second exchange year.

Accent

When speaking in Spanish for the first time with someone I like to ask that where I am from judging by my accent. Usually they do not know the answer because Finnish accent is not known. When speaking with grown up I have not had big understanding problems just with some words but once when I talked to a child and he could not understand me because of my accent. I would like to speak with an accent as close as possible to a native speaker. I should ask some Spanish person to help me to improve my pronunciation.