Somewhere New
I'm in Finland! Helsinki, more precisely, and the Scandic Continental Hotel if you wish to be yet more precise. The reason for my visit is that I am going to be working as an intern at Nokia until mid-November, whereupon I shall return to Swansea and begin^Wcarry on working towards my PhD.
Helsinki itself is very nice, and although the city is quite small, I've not explored it completely yet. I'm staying a short walk from the downtown area, which is filled with shops, restaurants and bars. Last night Shruti (another intern) and I visited a jazz cafe and watched some awesome musicians play while we ate our dinner. I was pleasantly surprised by the food - everyone told me to expect terrible things to be brought forth from Finnish kitchens, but it was delicious. Of course, I'm not claiming a beefburger to be the quintessential Finnish dish, but it was gooood.
I spent today wandering around the city, checking out parks, shopping malls and the like, and it's a fantastic place. We've found an apartment about 10 minutes by cycle from Nokia in one of the nicer parts of the city - I'm going to take a look at it tomorrow. All signs point to it being a great place to live - big rooms, situated 2 minutes from a fantastic park and the waterfront, 2 minutes in the other direction to shops, and, most importantly, there is a camera shop just around the corner! I've only taken a few photos so far, but I'll post them up here when they've been developed.
Of course, the apartment might yet fall through, as we've not yet signed the contract, and it's towards the higher end of the range I'd like to be paying for rent (650EUR/month!).
I start work tomorrow, and I imagine the next few days will be filled with mostly run of the mill paperwork and related formalities. Coincidentally, Matt is giving a talk at NRC on Tuesday, which should provide some (comic?) relief.
That's all for now!