First week in Helsinki is coming to an end. It was not very eventful though, since I had to stay in isolation for half the week.
Got registered in DVV (population registry), Kela (social security) and Taxes, celebrated Smartly.io's 8th birthday from behind my laptop...
Speaking of Smartly: reading lots and lots of policies and trainings. Quite a few things a obvious to me, since Citi had similar things in their policies and trainings, but the way they are presented is way better: imagine a security training with cuts from Simpsons.
It also looks like the more "human-oriented" policies are not just words here. It is too early to say this for sure, since I did not do any support (which is my job) yet, but I definitely see transparency and friendliness. Orientation plan (for 8 weeks!) includes 1-on-1 calls/meetings with peers (mostly due to Covid, from what I understand), but it certainly helps you ease into the "family". Or maybe even without the quotes, but I am reeling my expectations so far.
I wanted to go for my first proper walk-about the city to get the feel of it and look for general areas where I would consider living yesterday. Unexpectedly got too involved in research for apartments, though, so only went today, on Sunday. Went to Lauttasaari, where my co-worker and buddy Linda D'amario joined me for a walk and pin-pointed me some of points of interest in the area. Thank you, Linda. I am not sure yet, whether I will select this neighborhood yet, but choosing some apartments here can make quite some sense to me for the long run. Even if they seem expensive.
On the other hand... Everything seems expensive here. Compared to Moscow, which is not that cheap, the prices bite you a lot. Not only apartments, but food itself as well. For now it looks like I need 100-120 euro per week for food (6 relatively small "dishes"), while in Moscow Onmeals cover me for 2 weeks for ~the same 120 euros.
But the price may be worth it. I am currently buying ready meals (frozen or not), since I do not want to waste my time on cooking and invest into making the kitchen feel "mine", and so far I did not like only 1 "fluffy" yogurt from Valio (I think), because I did not like its texture (Russian "Чудо" has it better). I would even argue, that some of the dishes were even better in quality than those from Level Kitchen or Gymmeal.ru, which are not "mass produced". The others were comparable. I really liked the concept of "thai cubes": carton cubes, where main cube is filled by rice (around half of it) and has a second box with some meat with a sauce. Really simplistic, but I really like the "package" here.
And I guess I will end post on this tasty note.
Will only add, that on Instagram are some "panoramas" of the places near the apartments I selected for today's route. Not sure how useful they will be to the audience, but... They are better than just my words.
