Studying Abroad in Finland, Part I

by Ashley Upchurch (rising senior)

A year ago around this time, I was racing through Speight, the education building, trying to get ready to study abroad. At the time, I was too busy worrying over paperwork to stress about actually spending a semester in another country. Three months later, my paperwork was filled out and all I had to do was stop having nightmares about freak plane accidents or ending up in Siberia instead of Finland.

My fears were both sound and outrageous. First of all, who ever heard of a plane suddenly falling out of the sky, all its passengers dead upon impact in the Atlantic Ocean? Then again, how on earth does a giant piece of metal soar through the sky? Hadn’t anyone ever heard of gravity??? My anxiety didn’t end with the plane ride alone: I was going to Finland to live alone for my first time so far from home that it would take three trips across the US and back just to get there.

Finland, in my mind, was barren tundra full of man-eating moose and little to no civilization. Obviously, I was exaggerating: I knew moose didn’t typically eat people and if there was a place for me to study in Finland, there must be some people around. All the same, come July when everyone was pestering me over my plans the next semester, I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember why I’d chosen Finland of all places!

Brandi, the assistant director of International Relations at ECU, had somehow brainwashed me into thinking one of the northern most countries in the world where the average temperature doesn’t go above 55 (I have a deep and passionate dislike for cold weather, by the way) was a great place to study. She explained how she’d spent so much time there and personally attested to its beauty and enjoyable nature. She explained all of this to me that December. Seven months later, I was boarding a plane and still questioning both of our decision-making abilities. Little did I know that just a week after getting on that cramped plane in the RDU airport, I would find myself enjoying the best food I’d ever tasted, experiencing life as I’d never known possible, and meeting more interesting people than I could have ever before claimed!