Hello everybody!
So, as promised today I'm gonna talk a little bit about Turku, the city I'll be living in for the next ~6 months. I just realized I should really, really write down everything as soon as possible, or I'll forget about most of the more interesting stuff! .___.
Turku happens to be the 5th largest city of Finland, but don't tell anyone from Turku, because apparently they don't like to hear that, haha :D Actually, if you counted Espoo and Vantaa to Helsinki (which you can't cause they are cities on their own, but anyway XD) it would be the 3rd largest!
So anway, Turku is quite a nice city as far as I can tell, though smaller than Helsinki they still have everything you need. The town center is a kauppatori, a market place, where there are market stands every day. This is also the central bus station. Bus is the only mean of public transport in the city, but the buses go very frequently, there are a lot of stations all over town and so getting from A to B is working out quite well!
After I walked through town with my tutor and friend on Sunday, I actually had quite a good idea about the city layout and important points of interest. Fun fact: i have a really good sense of orientation - IF the sun is shining (because I seem to use it subconsciously to determine directions). If there is no sun, you could spin me around a few times and I couldn't tell where I came from afterwards :'D Well, at least that's true for new environments, like the city. So when there was some sun on the first day, I was actually quite happy because I could get a pretty good idea about what is where etc :D
I like Turku, especially the town center with the market square, though some corners of the city seem a little bit reminiscent of "Eastern bloc". A colleague from my school who also does her internship in Turku fell ill and had to go to the hospital and sty there over night, and we came to visit her... I was actually a little bit shocked by the sight of the room. Not that it was shabby or dirty, just... completely empty, except for her bed, a chair and, oddly enough, a flat screen TV. In Austrian hospitals you have drawers and shelves and usually the rooms have at least a tiny table and one or two chairs. (We also made fun of the situation to cheer her up a little bit, because they doctors at the hospital would we refuse to undertake a gastroscopy despite her heavy stomach ache, because they said she has to do a blood test for all kinds of diseases first. We were then joking around that we were all considered contaminated because we come from the "South" and we're probably infested with tons of parasites and diseases, haha XD This has developed into some kind of running gag by now ^^)

I was also kinda shocked when I first saw the Aurajoki. I thought, well, even the Danube's water is clearer than that! o_O A little google research revealed that the reason for the turbid, apparently dirty water is mainly the area around the spring of the river, which is rich in clay, so a lot of particles flow within the river. But also, a lot of nutrients from fertilizing the fields around the river reach the river bed and pollute the water.... Wikipedia says that 95% of Turku's tap water (which is the water I drink....) comes from the river, but I can't really believe that. I think I would notice if I couldn't see through my bottle with water anymore XD