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The spring has arrived in Birmingham!!It is so nice to see all the flowers and new little leaves on the trees and the temperatures have also got higher and it feels like real spring too.:)
Yesterday they celebrated St Patrick's day here with a parade, which I unfortunately missed....:( I was in the city centre though and saw lots and lots of people wearing Ireland shirts or something green anyway and carrying Irish flags or some huge Guinnes hats and other stuff. Children's faces were painted with green and oringe and everyone had a very happy and joyful mood. It was like Vappu, the first of May, in Finland. It also seemed like people had decided that the spring and sumer season has started now and there were many wearing only shorts,short skirts, t-shirts and tops!I still had my scarfe and jacket....:D Well,first of all I suffer from cold and I really would like to get better soon so I do not wan't to risk it by wearing too few clothes and it isn't THAT warm yet!!I need approx. 20 degrees to wear a t-shirt as I am always freezing.
There is another way to notice that the temperatures have got up....I don't need to turn on my radiator in middle of the night anymore as the room stays warm enough for sleeping now anyway!!:D This radiator is the strangest thing I have ever seen....it won't stay on all the time. You need to turn it on after every 45 minutes or so. You just need to push a little button there so that it starts blowing hot air into the room but it won't stay warm all the time as the radiators do in Finland. When I first arrived into this room it was ice cold in here and I couldn't even sleep because I was just shaking in my sleeping back the whole night.....luckily it has got better now...:D
I am already looking forward to my Easter break which starts in about 2 weeks time! I will be travelling around a lot during that break and it makes me very excited. First I will go home to Finland for 10 days, starting on my Birthday 27.3!!The reason for this trip isn't happy at all (Godfather's funeral) but it is nice to go home and relax there for a while.
Then I will come back to England with Sanna and Anna together and that will be absolutely marvellous!!!!:) I cannot wait til then!!!!!They will stay for a week and we have made lots of plans for it already. We will first stay in B'ham for few days for sighseeing, shopping and we will alos possiobly visit the Cadbury World chocolate factory! Then we go to Oxford and stay over night there and will continue to London from there where we also saty over night. One day after they leave another friend from Germany will join me here and we will go to Scotland togetehr!!I have dremt about Scotland for years and now finally I will go to Edinburgh for 4 days!!:) I am really excited about this trip as well...:)
I am also planning some more daytrips still to come before leaving England at the end of May. Liverpool, Blackpool and Manchester are on the list at least. Blackpool trip will be with our school's international society again and the others I will just make by myself. For this Saturday to come I have planned another visit to london but I will see the weather forecasts closer to the day...;) On Sunday then I would like to visit either the Botanical Gardens here in Brum or if the weather is bad I might choose The National Sealife instead. I have realised that my time has started to run shorter and shorter already so if I really want to see somethign and do lot of things I have to start now..:S The next time I will really have free time without any pöans yet will be in May!! So,anyone thinking of visiting me please come in May...:)
I have done my first bigger assignment for the uni here as well. It is about convention management and we needed to pick a destination in The UK and write an essay about it as a place to held conferences and meetings. gGreat,as if I would know some place in here so well...I chose Birmingham of course as it is probably the easiest one. I ahve no idea if I have done the assignment well or very badly....It was very difficult to do it as I don't nkow at all what the teachers want here. They are very strickt about the language here. It has to be strictly academic British English (obviosuly American English is not acceptable...:P). Luckily they do offer free service for the international students where they check our work for grammar mistakes! As those mistakes count as well for our grades it is handy! I still hope that the teachers will consider the fact that English isn't our first language so naturally we cannot use as smart language as the native speakers use.
Another big difference in writing the assignments here is the use of references. We don't need to use very many references in Jyväskylä. Although I think this is mostly because of the levbel of the teacheräs English it is still different. Here we need to use a lot of references and basically we cannot say anything without a reference for it. They don't want to see your own initiative here but they just want to see if you can read.....that is how I feel about thsi system! You don't need to be especially smart or use your barin that much.Just to undertsand what you read is enough.
I have got a feeling from some classes anyway that the teachers think that they are talking about very difficult and demanding topics here.....in reality the topics are kind of common sence...at least that is how they appear to me. One teacher was very worried that I might not be able to pass her course because I have never worked in a hotel and I didn't know some basic terms related to hotel business. Well,when we went thorugh those terms I was thinking all the time that "what the heck was suppose to be so difficutl about these....I didn't know the exact terms but I do know all thes ethings anyway...." Apparently the teachers, at least some of them, don't expect their students to be very intelligent here....or I wouldn't say you need to be intelligent to know these things...they are just common sence and everyday life!! I still haven't decided if I like that teacher who said I would have big problems with her course. She can be joking in the class and she laughs alot but she does have some very nasty comments from time to time. She is a kind of person whi is happy if you did everythin her way but if you do it differently, no matter what the result is, she gets mad. So,she is a woman...:D
Mostly I like my teachers here. We have a very nice, young Maltese teacher in one of our courses. We also have had a nice elderly lade teaching us academic English but she has been absent for the past two lectures and we had this elderly man instead but I don't like him as much as I liked her. He speaks to us v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y so that everyone surely understands. It is abit too much...he could use normal speed as that is what other teachers do in their lectures...:O Luckily the teachers don't use storng accents or dialects while they teach!!That would make it difficult...:D
I love my German teacher! She is so nice and friendly and she never gets frustrated if we make mistakes in the class. She is alwasy happy and smiling and she makes my day betetr as well if I had a bad morning...:) She is English but she has been living in Germany for some years and she has a German husband. Her accent is very German actually and I was surprised to hear it first....:)
My last teacher is the lady who teaches convention management. I am quite not sure about her either...she is very nice if you go to talk to her alone and ask things but she has a bit nasty role in front of the class. She is very strict and she doesn't smile a lot.
We had a Finnish party on saturday night in one of our kitchens. It was Saara's Birthday party and I brough some Finnish alcohol there from home last week (I had my nephew's christening and I went home for a weekend). I brought Salmari, Salmaikki vodka and some Fisherman's Friend's sweeties to make Fisu from them in here. We just bought a bottle of vodka and put the sweeteis into the bottle so that they melted there. There were some Spanish and Swedish students celebrating with us and it was worth of watchin when the Spanish tried Salmari...:D They absolutely hated it!!!! The Swedish girls liked it and so we destroyed the bottle together then..:)
The party was great and I could say that it was kind of typical way of clebration for different nationalities. The Finns were drinking lot of alcohol and taking lot of shots as usually. the Spanish guys were just hanging around smoking weed. .:D
It was real fun that night.
I have to stop writing again and go and send my essay to be grammar checked as the deadline for it is on Friday and it needs to be all done by then.
Happy spring for everyone!!
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