[Update] I’m back + working holiday in Helsinki, Finland

It’s been a while! I am back to blogging after more then a month of absence. Next to writing articles for The Beauty Suitcase I work as a freelance journalist and am in the final stages of graduating (journalism, as well). Unfortunately the latter has been taking up all my time lately. For example for a course my classmate Fleur and I took a trip to Finland. Here we investigated (and later wrote about) the place that durability has in Finnish education. I won’t bother you all with that, but I did think it would be interesting to show some of the fun things we did while working in Helsinki. Will you take a look?


Together with my friend and classmate Fleur. We stayed with my dear Finnish friends Anu and Heli that I met while in South Korea. Both of them have amazing apartments in Helsinki and I am so thankful to them for letting us stay with them! Thank you girls 🙂

The Finnish ladies taking us out to eat one of the best sushi ever!

Everyone always talks about how expensive Scandinavia is, but I honestly think that the prices aren’t that bad. Some things like alcohol or coffee are relatively expensive. However public transportation, clothes (really good sales) and super high quality sushi are all fairly cheap in Finland!

We only paid € 8,90 for this whole plate of ten super tasty salmon maki’s, which is so much less then what you would pay in The Netherlands or even The States! The place we went to is called ‘Sushi + Wine‘. They have a large menu and their sushi quality can easily be compared to that of sushi in Japan, and believe me, that is a huge compliment.

Our days usually started by finding out how to get to our destination using Reittiopas, Helsinki’s amazing online journey planner.

Working on our articles!

And the next day on our way again to yet another interview, by car this time. As you can see I never do something half-hearted.

Decorating my friends car with some harmless art.

Night view of the lovely city of Helsinki. This is pretty much the only ‘sightseeing that I did, because we were so busy conducting interviews.

We visited the university were my friend Anu works for an interview with the coordinator of environmental engineering.

And just like eight days had gone by. Before we knew it we were already on our way to the airport with the Finnair bus. I will go into more depth about things like public transportation, food and Finnish culture in an upcoming blog post.

It gets dark really early in Finland during this time of the year (around 15.30 the sun starts setting) and since we flew out just after sunset Fleur was able to make this beautiful picture.

In Helsinki I also interviewed international students about the reason they came to Finland. If you didn’t already know: education in Finland is completely free, even for foreigners. This made me wonder if a lot of internationals student would move to Helsinki just to get free schooling. In oder to make this blog a bit more journalistic I decided that starting this week I will start publishing one portrait interview every week. I hope you all would like it.

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With Love,

Elise Mooijman