Aalto ELEC Game of Trains

20/09/2015

20/09/2015

Salutations from Team Central Europe!

From Eindhoven, our journey continued towards our last place to visit, Delft University. We arrived there Friday afternoon, and found our way to the campus which was a walk away from the city centrum. We were welcomed by their international coordinator Gerdien de Graaf. We had a lengthy exchange about what studentlife in Delft is like.

Although Delft itself is a rather smaller and quiter place to live in, the University is quite big. The amount of arriving international students alone surpasses 1500 each year. Studying engineering is becoming trendy again in the Netherlands, and the uni is doing all it can to answer the exceeding demand on its capasities.

After our talk, we were shown around the campus by Gerdiens assistant Vangelis, who has come to study there from Greece. We saw the architectural department, the electrical engineering building, the main cafeteria and the university library, which Vangelis told us is a pretty famous building in Netherlands.

After the official program, we met up with a Finnish exchange student Joni from Aalto ELEC, who has just started his studies there this September. He showed us the way to our hostel, after which we had some nice Indian food and spent the evening in a nice small pub brewery that he had spotted for us beforehand. Joni told us that in his experience so far, studying in Delft had indeed been quite international, having worked in groups of several different nationalities. He found the provided accommodation sufficient, and said he was staying here until January.

Unlike Eindhoven, Delft is in a part of the Netherlands which is below sea level. Cannals of water circle around the streets in the city centrum, providing a quite scenic stroll in the midst of the shops and restaurants. Aside from the university, the most prominent sights around were the old church, which was tilted, and the marketplace. On saturday before our leaving, the people were gathering to form a flea market there, something Joni told us happens every week.

After Delft, there was nothing left for us to do other than begin our journey back home to Finland. Our saturday consisted of more than 14 hours of travel overall, during which we went back to Hamburg Germany for our flight. Many games of Gin were played among listening to podcasts, music, and reading. In the end we arrived home at a bit past 11PM.

All in all, the experience we had during this past week has been quite eye-opening and thrilling. Being in Otaniemi and enjoying the student life here, its easy to begin thinking that this is the only and best place for me. It's only when you step outside to look around that you see how much other places have to offer as well. Studying abroad really gives you the best of both worlds, being able to savour life in another country and another culture. We only got a small taste of each place during our visits, but many times we pondered what a nice place it would be to study there. I'm sure the had similar experiences.

As they say: When you play the Game of Trains, you either win or you die...Wel, actually that is not the case at all. But we certainly feel like we achieved victory in our game. Thanks to everyone who stuck around and followed our journey towards greatness!

19/09/2015

Greetings from !

In Stockholm we started Friday by visiting the KTH Electrical Engineering's international office, they gave us a quick tour around the campus and we discussed exchange studies. After that we got some food at the students' house Nymble.

Then it was time to head to the main program of our day, Konglig Elektrosektionen's and Sektionen för Medicinsk Teknik's n0llegasque (thank you for inviting us!), which is a ceremony in which the freshman students (nollor) officially become first-year students (ettor). The ceremony began with a freshman spex, and proceeded with a "sittning" which is an academic dinner, a tradition already familiar to us from the Finnish student culture ("sits"), although there were a couple of differences. Most of their songs were unfamiliar so we got to learn many new ones! When the "sittning" was over everyone headed to Tolvan which is a kind of a guild room, but also functioned as a bar during the after party even though it is located in the University's building. Overall the n0llegasque was really fun and continued until the next morning,

18/09/2015

Team Central Europe here. Incase you find yourself travelling across the Netherlands and in need of help, you may use our "Tried-and-True 18 -Step Guide on How to Travel from Eindhoven to Delft via Interrail":

1. Consult your Rail Planner app, and see that you have a single train connection going straight from Eindhoven to Delft from 9:30AM to 11AM.

2. Board said train.

3. At your 3rd-to-last stop, Dordrecht, notice that the train has been turned off, an announcement is sounded in Dutch and all the other passengers leave the train. Pay no heed to this, as you are an ignorant Interrail-traveller with no understanding of Dutch.

4. Begin to suspect something fishy, when you notice the train starts travelling to the same direction where you initially came from.

5. At the next stop, try to exit the train, only to find out that the doors in your wagon are not working.

6.Try again, this time successfully, at the next station, Tilburg. Conclude from the Dutch announcements via Google Translate, that there is a misconnection between Dordrecht and Rotterdam Centraal for some reason.

7. Board a train going to the same direction you were first going.

8. Hop off at Dordrecht.

9. Ask the info desk to figure out, that you need to take another train to Rotterdam Blaak, the underground metro to Rotterdam Centraal, and then board another train again to Delft.

10. Do as you're told and arrive at Rotterdaam Blaak to board a metro. The metro station is connected to the train station, so this transition only requires one set of stairs. Note the absense of any ticket desks to buy a ticket, or any ticket gates when you board the subway.

11. Depart the subway at an intermediate stop on your way to your destination Rotterdam Centraal, only to find out, that you are unable to exit the subway station or change tracks through the gates, without having first purchased an electronic subway ticket.

12. Wander back and forth through multiple different subway stations to confirm that your findings in step 11 indeed apply for all the stations.

13. Find out from an info desk, that the only legit way to exit the subway station with an interrail ticket is to:
- go to the gates
- call the service desk at that station via the intercom
- ask them to open the gates for you
- be on your merry way

14. Execute your genius plan devised in step 13 at Rotterdam Blaak to exit the subway that had become your prison, only to find out that the blockage, that had previously blocked your way from Dordrecht to Rotterdaam Centraal, has now been cleared.

15. Repeat the steps in entry 13 to enter the station again.

16. Board the exact same train connection you were first on.

17. Arrive finally at Delft Station. The time is 2PM.

18. Have a beer.

18/09/2015

Team Central Europe:

From Leuven, Belgium, we continued onwards to Eindhoven, Netherlands, on Wednesday evening. Eindhoven was the first and only place where we spent more than one night.

We visited the University on Thursday. The campus is situated right next to the train station. When we first headed inside, right away we randomly ran into a local student named Tom, who greeted us and said that he had many friends in Helsinki, Finland (one of which we figured out was a mutual friend of ours). We also managed to run into a Finnish student of Industrial Design, who was doing her Bachelor in Eindhoven.

TU/e has several differenet faculties, each of which has its own student association, much like we have in the Aalto. Compared to some the previous universities that we have visited, TU/e is quite small, facilitating approximately 9000 students, with a considerable section of them being international students. Exceptionally, TU/e even offers some of its Bachelor programs completely in English. As we were told by some students we met at the common room (much like the guildrooms we would have in Aalto, except for all students), the student culture in Eindhoven is quite lively and the asociations are active. Each of the faculties even has their own student bar on the campus site!

All in all, Netherlands gave us a great introduction to itself in Eindhoven, with tons of bikes and scooters, lively pubs and street life.

17/09/2015

Tjenare från allesammans!

Today we visited Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. We started by visiting Z-teknologsektionen, which in Aalto language would be a "guild" of students of automation and mechatronics, where they treated us to a Swedish "fika". After that we met the board of the local student union Chalmers Studentkår and got a great tour of the campus and when they had to go back to work, we decided to try the local pub in their student house. The pub reminded us quite a lot about every Otaniemi teekkari's favorite pub Ravintola Cantina. Afterwards we went to get some food and then went to the library to get some School stuff done. In the evening we continued to Stockholm where we will be spending the rest of our trip.

17/09/2015

The same carnival had quite a different feeling at night.

17/09/2015

Just strolling down the streets of Leuven, and just after noticing an unexpected eduroam connection, we come to a travelling Carnival.

17/09/2015

Hello Everybody! Team Central Europe with another update:

We left Bochum and Germany on Tuesday afternoon, and arrived into Leuven, Belgium. Leuven is a bit smaller, older city in the Dutch-seaking part of the country, which houses about 90 000 people. About 40 000 of them are University students. This is very much a city of students, which became apparent to us when we noticed an unexpected eduroam-connection randomly in the middle of the centrum.

The university is spread quite far, having buildings in the very center and also a whole different Campus site about a 5-minute train ride away. Each of the different faculties has its own student association, which organizes loads of events for their students. We were told that there is a lot of competition among the different associations, which is a feeling we can relate to via the Finnish guild-system in Aalto Tech. We got the impression that international students are very well integrated into the community, with about 25% of the Engineering students being international.

The city itself was quite lively, with plenty of various bars for us to visit. There even happened to be a travelling amusement park passing by. We had a great time in Leuven, and again, only wished that we had more time to spend there.

16/09/2015

Hello!

This morning we headed back to Sweden to visit the faculty of engineering at Lund University. We were welcomed by Linnea who is the head of international affairs at the student union. She showed us around the campus, and amongst all the red brick buildings we almost felt like home.

Following a delicious but quite expensive lunch at the student restaurant. We also went to a study hall in AF Borgen, a students' house in central Lund, where we managed to get some of our homework of this week done.

Afterwards we continued to Gothenburg by train and spent one hour looking for a pizzeria.

15/09/2015

Hej allesammen!

Another day in Denmark for . Today, we visited the DTU International Office. Afterwards we met our friend Carin who is an exchange student at DTU, and tried the local student cafeteria. The lunch experience was quite different from the usual Finnish student lunch since there was no fixed price, and everyone is expected to weigh their own food.

In the afternoon, we visited Christiania which is an anarchist community in Copenhagen. Seeing Christiania was really cool since it's quite different from the rest of Copenhagen, but unfortunately it's forbidden to take pictures there so we were only able to photograph the gate. After that, we went to Visit Carlsberg, the Copenhagen brewery's visitor centre, where we learned more about the development of beer brewing since the 19th century and also got to see the world's largest collection of beer bottles with the amazing amount of 22558 bottles.

Later tonight we are going to go hang out with some international students at DTU, and tomorrow we will continue our trip to Lund University!

15/09/2015

Greetings from Central Europe! Our second destination during our trip was Bochum. The city has a quite small center which has really nice streets for scouting new places. The actual university is situated south of the city center, the subway trip took only about 15 minutes. Ruhr-Universität has around 40 000 students and quite an amount of faculties. The faculty of electrical engineering by itself had about 1500 students and 9 majors to choose from. The campus was huge and had for example a concert hall and a HUGE botanical garden.