Wednesday, January 12, 2005
At the University
Monday Jan 10 - Where to begin?
Lunch! Apparently, businesses and the universities subsidize lunch for both faculty and students, Students eat for about 2 euros and faculty for about 4 euros. Also, all students in primary and secondary school eat for free. Thus there are a lot of cafeterias at the university, and businesses have large cafeterias centrally located. Lunch at the university consists of a choice of two or three main meat courses and almost always boiled potatoes (imagine ambrosia, not the potatoes we get in the US) or rice. And no matter what you select, you get a trip to the salad bar, with lettuce, grated or sliced cucumbers, sliced tomatoes, pickled mushrooms, and salad dressing. There are usually 5 kinds of rolls or bread to choose from, and you can get coffee etc.
That's fine so far, but what it means is that groups of students and faculty almost always go to lunch together, so your team starts to become more family-like. And speaking of family, many of the team have children, though everyone in the ed tech unit seems quite young (i.e. late 20s and early 30s), and two faculty are out now on maternity leave. I surmise that they have maybe 11 months off for maternity leave (not exactly sure about that, one person had mentioned that they took 11 months), but more important, child care is subsidized by the government, and what you pay depends on your income level. If you are a single mother with a low paying job, it would be free, for married faculty members here, it is about half of what it would cost in the US. The implications I think are that families seem to get married and have children at an earlier age, which may also just be the culture.
Regarding the weather, on this date last year, the temperature was -30 c, but today the sun is shining and the temperature is a balmy 8 c. (about 40 F.) Everything is covered with about 12 inches of snow and the sidewalks and roads are snow packed but plowed. The plows come nearly every morning around 5:30 and do their noisy business. Here are bikes lined up outside the Education building at 11 am in the morning.
The department is treating me like royalty. My office is nearly twice the size of my Penn State office, and I have a new top of the line desktop computer.
Lunch! Apparently, businesses and the universities subsidize lunch for both faculty and students, Students eat for about 2 euros and faculty for about 4 euros. Also, all students in primary and secondary school eat for free. Thus there are a lot of cafeterias at the university, and businesses have large cafeterias centrally located. Lunch at the university consists of a choice of two or three main meat courses and almost always boiled potatoes (imagine ambrosia, not the potatoes we get in the US) or rice. And no matter what you select, you get a trip to the salad bar, with lettuce, grated or sliced cucumbers, sliced tomatoes, pickled mushrooms, and salad dressing. There are usually 5 kinds of rolls or bread to choose from, and you can get coffee etc.
That's fine so far, but what it means is that groups of students and faculty almost always go to lunch together, so your team starts to become more family-like. And speaking of family, many of the team have children, though everyone in the ed tech unit seems quite young (i.e. late 20s and early 30s), and two faculty are out now on maternity leave. I surmise that they have maybe 11 months off for maternity leave (not exactly sure about that, one person had mentioned that they took 11 months), but more important, child care is subsidized by the government, and what you pay depends on your income level. If you are a single mother with a low paying job, it would be free, for married faculty members here, it is about half of what it would cost in the US. The implications I think are that families seem to get married and have children at an earlier age, which may also just be the culture.
Regarding the weather, on this date last year, the temperature was -30 c, but today the sun is shining and the temperature is a balmy 8 c. (about 40 F.) Everything is covered with about 12 inches of snow and the sidewalks and roads are snow packed but plowed. The plows come nearly every morning around 5:30 and do their noisy business. Here are bikes lined up outside the Education building at 11 am in the morning.
The department is treating me like royalty. My office is nearly twice the size of my Penn State office, and I have a new top of the line desktop computer.
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Keep up Roy good work! Your comparisons between Finns and USA nationalities are very interesting. It's pleasure for me to follow your blog and to be your collague here at University of Oulu.
t. Jari
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t. Jari
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