A blog
entry on the end of exchange has been long overdue, but since I got back to
Finland less than two weeks ago this post still feels relevant. After a busy
last week and sad goodbyes with our great group of exchange friends in Lisbon,
I flew to Finland for one week around Christmas before continuing the journey
to my parents in Arizona. Now that I'm back to reality, it is nice to recollect
about the past autumn.
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| My favorite viewpoint in Lisbon - Largo das Portas do Sol |
Overall the
exchange semester in Lisbon was fantastic. I met so many new people who are now good friends, enjoyed many sides of
Lisbon, travelled several times and also had some pretty good learning
experiences at Nova University of Lisbon. Lisboetas were also treated with a
remarkably long and sunny autumn so we hung out at beaches until early
November. Even when it suddenly got rather cold in mid November, the sun kept
on shining.
Lisbon is a
great city for exchange students. The city is small enough to get around easily
but big enough for it not to get boring. Housing and living expenses are rather
low, especially when comparing with Finland.
There are a lot of options for eating out, having drinks or going
clubbing as there is something going on around the city every day. In daytime
there are also various cafes and terraces to enjoy the sun. The weather overall
is a great plus - temperature wise summer lasts forever and winters seem to be
like Finnish autumns.
Culturally
it was a good experience to live in a South European culture - partly
frustrating, partly refreshing. It took some time to for example get used to
long waits everywhere and people being late for everything. This was also
discussed in our HR class, in which Nordic people described Portuguese as
ineffective, where as the Portuguese described Nordics as rather uptight,
stressed and controlling. Cultural differences and cultural prejudice goes both
ways. But living in Lisbon definitely
taught me to change my attitude at least a little bit and not mind so much if
things do not happen at the immediate second I would expect them to.
Nova
University of Lisbon has a good level of teaching and a decent selection of
courses to choose from. Naturally there are some differences in teaching
methods and evaluation that I was not always a fan of, but overall I definitely
learned a lot of new, valuable and practical things in many of the courses. The
workloads for courses were not massive, but did require concentration and some
work to be done. And as for passing, in the courses that I took it was easy to
pass when I attended classes and did the required work. From what I heard
though, some finance and economics classes were extremely demanding and there
was sometimes not even a clear explanation as to why some people failed and
others passed.
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| Nova SBE campus |
All in all,
the time in Lisbon was really amazing and I can truly recommend it as a place
for exchange. Right now I am really
missing all the fun times, pretty buildings, beautiful viewpoints, fresh seafood & vinho verde,
sunny beaches and many other things that make Lisbon so special. Hopefully I
get to go back soon!
