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Saying Goodbye to Helsinki

It’s hard to believe that three months abroad has flown by so fast. Before I knew it, it was time to say goodbye to the place that I had just started to call home. Three months is not your average exchange - most last for five - but I signed up for a unique program in which three months were spent in Finland and the last two months were spent in a remote Norwegian village.  

So there was only one way to spend our last few nights in Helsinki, and that was to throw an epic party. I knew I wanted one – something to send off our time here with a bang. We were six Australians who all had to say adieu, which meant inviting all of our friends and fitting them into my modestly-sized apartment.

I started to spread the word through trusty Facebook and let all of my fellow Aussies be admins. When I started scrolling through my friend list to send invitations to all of my new exchange friends, I started to realise that we had made a lot of friends here. Before I knew it, I had invited more than 60 people, and that didn’t include the people the other Aussies would invite. Nervousness started to settle in slightly when I again thought about my apartment's ability to accommodate that many people. Surely there would be no shows and people who couldn’t make it? But as time went by, the amount of ‘attending’ people continued to rise until we had over 50 people confirmed.

It also didn’t help that one of my close friends, who we will call ‘Tom’, got pissed one night out in Helsinki and invited almost half of the nightclub. Of course, his new drunk friends at the time all enthusiastically said yes to the party, but likely forgot about it by the next morning. So, there were luckily only about 60 people squeezed into my apartment that night. We had loud music, and lots of food and drink, which created a lot of noise.

So we weren’t too surprised when my friend Laura told me that she saw a police car parked outside. I looked outside the window and couldn’t see anything, but she insisted that she was serious. Hmm… what to do now? I walked through the dance floor, which has previously been my living room, and proceeded to switch off the music.

“Police are coming,” I told Georgie (one of the Aussies) as I switched the volume button to low.

“You got two choices here,” she responded. “You either keep the music playing, and the cops come and break it up, or, you keep the music playing and the cops break it up anyway.” 

I shrugged. “Well, party on then,” I said and turned the music back up.

Turns out the police did come – but went to the wrong house! I don’t know how or why, but they didn’t make it to our party. So we continued with the dancing, shots, games and goodbyes until the wee hours of the morning.

I woke up in the morning to a black floor, empty food packets, deflated balloons and an uncountable amount of beer and alcopop bottles, which required an all-day clean up. But it was worth it – when you’ve been on exchange and you’re going to leave, it’s the end of an era, and it's sad to realise I might never see the friends I’ve made again. I’ve seen these people every day for three months and you create a very unique friendship with other exchange students, compared with other situations. You go to the same school, live in the same area, organise and attend the same parties and share the same experience. I know I’m genuinely going to miss these people, because it’s never going to be the same again. My friend Laura who has studied in four countries in her life talked about how we’re not going to see each other once this is all over. I went into denial a bit and said “but we’ll stay in touch, with email and Facebook.”

“Yeah I know,” she replied. “But it’s like my friends in New Zealand or Italy, we chat for like five minutes and then you don’t talk – sure, if I come to Australia or you come to Germany we’ll go out and get a coffee, but life goes on.” It made me a little sad to hear this, not because I was upset at her, but because I realised she was right.

Some of you might know that this is not my first exchange, and I had exactly the same experience with my friends from my exchange to Malaysia. We all got really close on the exchange and I couldn’t imagine by the end of it what it would be like to not see them on a weekly basis, and thought that we would all be catching up every few weeks back home in Melbourne – but it didn’t happen. Almost all of us live in the same city, but we all went back to our usual lives. We went to uni, hung out with the friends we had before the exchange and did whatever it was we used to do, instead of living together, going out to dinner together every night or going to the same parties. It’s sad to say it, but life just went on.

However, the difference is that when I do see these friends I met on exchange, its like no time has passed and we can just pick up the conversation where we left off.

I think it’s because we had that experience together - being the only Aussies in a Malaysian campus and just having the experience of living together. So even though I’m sure life will go on, I can take some comfort in the fact that it’s not hard to get back to the friendship you had when you do get eventually in touch.

London and Scotland

There was no way that I wasn’t going to take advantage of having a two-week semester break in Europe. The only option was to travel and to travel widely. To give you an idea of how wide that can be, here’s where my fellow Aussies ended up during the mid-semester break: England, Scotland, Russia, Dubai and the Netherlands.

Many people will tell you to take advantage of the opportunity to travel while on exchange, and I was going to be one of those people. How often are you going to be in a situation where it’s only a three hour flight to London? Or where a flight to London is considerably cheaper? So that’s what I did. I booked a return flight for 198 euros (less than $300) and headed to the United Kingdom for ten days. This was going to be a unique experience for me in many ways. It would be the first time I would ever travel completely solo.

I’d travelled with family, with friends and with school groups – but I’d never rocked up to a country by myself. Truthfully, this made me a bit nervous – there’s that little paranoid part of your brain that worries about losing your passport, having your handbag snatched while eating dinner or being attacked in an alleyway – if something went wrong I would be on my own.

So I decided to look up an old family friend who I hadn’t seen in over ten years and ended up scoring free accommodation for my time in England. This was one of the smartest decisions I’d ever made, but it wasn’t because I saved over a hundred pounds. I was really happy I looked up my uncle and his wife while travelling, because I found out that they are incredibly generous and lovely people to be around. There was someone to go out to a pub with at the end of the day and just talk about what I had been doing – without trying to sound too sentimental, the friendship was worth much more than the money I saved.

But during the day, it was all independent travel for the iconic city which is London. I could go onto all of the cool things to do in London and believe me there are many cool things to do – so many that I don’t think you could do them all, even if you spent your whole life there. But I think that what might be more useful is knowing what the perks of doing the tourist thing solo are:

What you want is what you get. This might seem like an obvious one, but you get to see what you want, when you want and for as long as you want. For me, seeing Hampton Court (an old Tudor castle) was a must, but surely that’s not everyone’s cup of English tea! The beauty of it is – who cares? There was no travel buddy looking anxiously at their watches trying to hint that it was time to move onto something else. I was on my own, I stayed for as long as I wanted and left when I wanted. Note that this rule applies to every attraction you want to see.

Setting the budget. I can now imagine that when you’re travelling with someone you’re not only constrained by your own budget but someone else’s as well. When I stopped to spend four pounds on a hot chocolate in Oxford Street I rested easily because I could afford it, but for someone on a tight budget that might not have been the case. You don’t want to be the one who’s dining in a Thai restaurant while your friend sits on the pavement with a sandwich that was on sale because it was about to go past its use-by date.  

My days in London involved enjoying the history of the Tower of London and Shakespeare’s Globe, hunting for bargains in Oxford and Regent Street and taking a spin on the London Eye (which, to be honest, is actually a bit boring), before heading home to have dinner and go out with my uncle and his family in the evening. Oh yes – life was good, and I couldn’t have been happier that I decided to travel through the mid-semester break. Then I woke up on Tuesday to start my travels in Scotland.

I decided to begin my travels in Edinburgh, and when I finally got there after some hassles with the British Rail System, I was quite amazed at the beauty of the place. I felt like I had stepped into Diagon Alley, complete with an ancient castle perched on top of a volcano. There was time to soak up the Edinburgh atmosphere, check out the old town and some of the other sights before heading back to my hostel room to relax.

So at the end of day one in Edinburgh, I turned my key into my hostel room door and dumped my bag onto my double bed. I flopped down onto it, resting my aching feet from walking around Edinburgh all day. I picked up the novel I’d thrown into my bag and started to read. After forty minutes I noticed it had started to get dark outside, and on top of that, things were really… quiet. I gazed outside the window, looking onto the cobbled streets, not really knowing what to do with myself. Then I felt something that I hadn’t felt before while in London – loneliness. Pure and simple – I was lonely and bored. There was no one to talk to, no one to share things with.

I think we can put this under the ‘con’ column when it comes to solo travel. I found myself doing things like deciding to read in the common room just because there were other backpackers there, despite the fact I couldn’t speak to them because they all spoke Spanish. Or making conversation with the guy at reception when I came back, “So how’s you’re day been, how is the family?” and things like that. A good cure for this, however, is tour groups. Pay a bit of money for someone to drive you all around the Western Highlands, drop you off and pick you up - plus, get local advice, all within the comfort of a small group of other travellers who you can hang out with. I don’t mean to sound like a walking advertisement, but doing a two-day tour was a great way to travel and combat the loneliness I’d felt in Edinburgh.

For the next two days, I drove past what looked like Middle Earth; wide unkempt wilderness, sparkling Scottish Lochs and picturesque seaside towns, with a few good history lessons thrown in. I spent my days chatting with other travellers, eating out and indulging in Scottish shortbread and fudge. Once again, life was good.

Samantha at a lookout in St Andrews, Scotland.

On the last day of my tour, I reached into the pocket of my suitcase where I had decided to store my cash. The left side had my budget for accommodation and the right side was spending money. So I was pretty surprised when I rummaged into my suitcase to find I only had one twenty pound note left. One note? ONE NOTE! ‘How did this happen?!’ I asked myself. I started taking clothes out of my suitcase - maybe something had fallen behind my clothing… Nope, nothing. I looked at my last remaining note with bereft, which wouldn’t even pay for my accommodation that night... what the hell did I spend my money on? I started to rack my brains for ideas – Subway on the run, a post card or two at a souvenir shop, plus some Scottish shortbread which seemed cheap at the time and then getting sucked into paying $13 for a bowl of penne pasta with plain tomato sauce (it was a tourist stop on the tour; one of those stops where they can charge what they like because they know you’ve got no where else to go) had all added up – what a cliché! Now, this wasn’t exactly a disaster; twenty pounds was enough for day to day expenses and being $66 over budget for my whole trip surely won’t win me gold for overspending awards, but my little bubble of pride for being a savvy independent budget traveller deflated a bit. It was time to start watching my money, and that’s when I discovered the best travel meal any independent traveller can wish for – Subway!

Not only is it cheap and easy, but you can get a fairly healthy lunch which is ideal to eat when sightseeing at the same time. And if you really want to be frugal – buy a 12 inch sub for 5 pounds rather than two six inch subs for three pounds each and eat half for lunch and half for dinner – getting you two meals and saving a pound! …. Yes, this is what travelling can do to you!

So I ended up a little over budget, added an extra four kilos to an already heavy suitcase and ended up eating Subway twice a day to get by - but I’d do it all again. It was worth all the money I had to have the experience of travelling solo and seeing a beautiful part of the world.

In next month's column...

My next stop? Norway! More specifically, Kautokeino Norway, with a population of 3,000 and even more reindeer. Adding to that, I’ll be living with six other students who will be the only members of my class; it’s going to be a slightly bigger version of Big Brother – stay tuned!