University of Tampere (UTA)

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Tampere is the second biggest city in Finland, so it's not a small village. You can find theatres, cinemas, a lot of shops, cafeterias, etc. But it's not a big city neither. You can find a lot of green there, woods with beautiful lakes. Sometimes you miss sun there, but the winter is marvelous. As for the trips go to Tallin, Lapland and St. Petersburg!!

Be very careful to supply a date of leaving to your housing company. You must send them written confirmation at the start of your last month.Many students were charged an extra months rent because they were a few days late in supplying notice of their leaving. The housing system is quite rigid in its application of contracts.

You can travel to many places from tampere: Stockholm, Russia, Lapland, Latvia, Tallin... a lot of choice. And don't forget to rent a cottage for a weekend!

In Finland almost everybody speaks at least some English so I had no greater difficulties at this. After a while I became familiar with inscriptions and packages of the products and I could communicate through Internet with the majority because the use of it is wide-spread and services are offered in a big quantity here. Just one thing that is a Finnish feature - they don't seem to be very talkative and never start converstation first!

my fluency in English..deteriorated a bit since all internationals spoke s.c. Erasmus English. at the other side, i've learnt to write serious essays in English. Finnish: trying to study Finnish made me feel more comfortable, as i was in Finland. nontheless, it did not help me much to be able to communicate w/ locals in their native language. All in all, i'm very happy i had a chance to learn a bit of that not so often heard language.