Welcome to St. John's

It's been a week since I moved in to my room at MUN (Memorial University of Newfoundland) campus. There's been orientation, information sessions and even a few actual lectures during this time. Not to mention evening activities. Campus is much bigger compared to LUT, but luckily there's a tunnel (MUNnel) system underground between different buildings and residence, so you don't have to experience outdoors if you don't want to. In this post I'll go through my first thoughts about living here, on-campus at MUN and in Canada.

What's it like living in Canada compared to Finland?

The most noticeable thing is that people are very friendly and much more talkative than in Finland (surprise). Also, Aapo seems to be a hard name to pronounce (too many vowels?) and Finland appears to be the most exciting country ever. It's been a fun week, and apart from actually having to do some actual school work it's probably going to be a fun semester as well.

There are lots of small details that you wouldn't even think about before actually coming here. E.g. Finnish tap water is the best in the world, mobile data transfer is practically free in Finland and cars in Europe are small. In Canada everything seems to be sponsored, there are STOP -signs on nearly every intersection, there are hardly any bicycles and both snow days and those yellow school buses actually are real things. Using credit/debit cards sometimes include extra fees, sometimes not, and I have no idea why. Everything from taps to wall sockets and mattresses to door knobs/handles are different. So far the most intimidating thing in Canada has been to try and use waffle machines that seem to be everywhere, maybe next week I'll have enough courage. Apart from all the minor details, transition to living here has been quite painless. And at least SI units are used and people like ice hockey, so there's something in common.

Language-wise English here is easy to understand, most people speak without any too thick accent or dialect. And most of my speech seems to be understood as well. Food-wise the differences have not been that significant so far. But like any Finn, I'll probably start missing rye bread pretty soon.

Housing and living on campus

There's a variety of different housing options available at campus. There are apartments, usually shared, as well as dormitory style houses with single and double bedrooms. Primarily I applied for a room in an apartment style residence, and had dormitory residence as my backup option. After all, housing is guaranteed for all new students, so I figured that would be the easiest way to get a place for this Fall. I ended up missing the initial time slot for a room selection, because for some reason you can have a webmail where you can write emails, but not receive (most of) them, thus me missing info about the time slot. Therefore I got auto-allocated to a double bedroom at House Curtis, Paton College. Am I sorry about that? Not at all, and here's why:

When beginning your studies at LUT, guilds are usually the kind of communities where you would meet your first friends, tutors and older students. There are guild rooms, there are events just for the guild and usually big portion of your friends would be from the same guild. I don't believe there are any organizations similar to guilds at MUN. But luckily, there are houses. People at your house are the first ones you're going to meet, orientation is mostly done with the people from your house and there are some events specifically for the people from your house. In practice, houses are kind of like guilds, but they're for the people living under the same roof instead of for the people studying the same major. And I think that's really nice, because people are studying completely different things and still there's a great community you are a part of. So if you're thinking about studying here, I'd highly recommend campus residence, so that you get to be part of a house and the awesome community coming with it.

Double bedroom example from MUN website. I didn't dare include a real photo of my room.

What's also good about the houses, is that everything is taken care of without having to do much yourself. Common spaces are cleaned, there's always food available (see below), broken stuff gets (eventually) fixed, rooms are furnished and so on. It's almost like I'm living with my parents, except I'm probably one of the oldest people here and I don't have to do as much chores.

Of course, there are also downsides of living in these types of houses. There's not much privacy compared to e.g. Finland, where practically all students have own or shared apartments. Having shared common spaces with other people requires a lot of rules, which is both understandable and sometimes irritating. It's also somewhat expensive (about 1950 CAD / 1350 € per semester), since living off-campus you'd get a shared apartment for the same price except without someone cleaning the common spaces and all that. Apartment style on-campus housing would be even more expensive. Also food is an additional (and obligatory) cost required for those living in these houses, and by buying and making your own food you'd save a lot. So what you're practically paying for is to have somebody do your food and some of the cleaning for you, and for me that's worth the money at least while living abroad.

As mentioned, for those living in certain campus residences buying a meal plan is obligatory. It's not cheap (about 2500 CAD / 1700 € per semester), but it covers almost everything: you can eat as much as you want during dining hall opening hours (7 am - 8 pm). Compared to Finnish student restaurants, dining hall is like combining 3 restaurants and a cafeteria together with the exception that you can eat as much as you want, and anything you want. Including desserts and all that. And it's ~50 m from your house. There's also a certain amount of money fixed in to your account that you can spend on cafes and restaurants around campus, if you don't feel like walking over 5 minutes to eat between classes or you want something different. So instead of living on noodles the whole semester, you could just eat pizza and ice cream as much as you want. I try not to.

Dining hall from outside (MUN website)

Next post will most likely be about 2 weeks from now. I'll probably introduce the university and the city of St. John's more thoroughly, once I get to know to places better myself. And I'll try to remember to take pictures myself, instead of just going through MUN websites.

-Aapo