Minun yliopisto

I know it's a pretty bad pic, but there in the background, across the road, behind the trees, there is our uni (it looks nice with the sun and the fountain tho!)
 
As I've moved here as part of my university degree and studying is the main thing I will be focusing on while here, I guess it's only fair I tell you a bit more about it! I'm currently, at the same time as being an official UCL student, enrolled at Петрозаводский государственный университет, or in English - Petrozavodsk State University. Because that's a pretty lengthy name and because Russians love their abbreviations it's mostly just called ПетрГУ (they do the same thing calling it PetrSU in English). It was founded in 1940 as the Karelian-Finnish State University and was known as such until they changed it's name in 1956. According to its website it has "more than 18 500" students, 85 chairs and 17 faculties. 
 
Yours truly is enrolled as an international student for the year to come styding Russian and Finnish. We've already started with two hours of Russian each day (an academic hour in Russia is 45 mins - so two hours is really one and a half). This will probably increase next week when another teacher (who's been away) is coming back, and we will have the double amount of classes. My class consists of three people at the moment, Clara from France, Grace from England and Myself from Schtaan.
 
I will start Finnish in the beginning of October, and I've been told that the Finnish classes meet only for four hours a week. At some point I will meet with the Finnish tutor for an assessment of my level. What is really exciting is that I will be in a class with Russian students. I'm hoping the classes will be taught in Finnish, cause although it'd be hard, it'd probably be lots easier than having to switch between Russian and Finnish in class!
 
A quite random addition to all of this is that I'll be taking a course called Korea in International Relations. Say what?! Yeah, that's what I thought as well. I was absolutely convinced that they said Karelian culture - I mean, that would be logical for Karelia, right? Anyhow, the course will be taught by a professor from the Central European University in Budapest. The reason I'm taking the course is that it's quite small (4 ECTS/HP), it's only till December and that I figured it's a good way to get to know people (also, it's free)! Hopefully it won't have to regret it...
 
All of this might seem like a lot - 4h of Russian a day 4h of Finnish a week and this Korean stuff and my Year Abroad Project (which I'll tell you about at another time!). I'm not too worried tho. The 'hours' are quite short as I mentioned earler, and the 2h a day that we've done this far have been quite a swift experience. I'm actually looking forward to getting more work to do!
 
We briefly touched upon abbreviations, so to finish off I'll give you some famous Russian ones:
 
KGB (КГБ) - Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti - Committee for State Security 
Komsomol (комсомол) - Kommunisticheskij Soyuz Molodjozhi - Youth Department of the Soviet Communist Party
GUM (ГУМ) - Glavnyj Universal'nyj Magazin - Main universal store
 
And a crazy one:
 
Rosglavstankoinstrumentsnabsbyt - Glavnoe upravlenie po snabzheniyu i sbytu stankov kuznechno-pressovogo oborudovaniya, instrumenta i abrazivnykh izdelij pri Gosplane RSFSR (the main management for supply and sales of machine tools forging equipment, tools and abrasing equipment of the Gosplan of RSFSR.
 
And it doesn't stop there, cause Gosplan and RSFSR are abbreviations of Gosudarstvennyj Komitet po Planirovaniyu (State Committee for Planning) and Rossiyskaya Sovetskaya Federativnaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic). Wow. You can really see the need for abbreviations, right?
 
So long!

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