Finland Forum

My Helsinki food story of 2015, partly thanks to this forum, has been the discovery of Elävä Maa: http://www.elavamaa.fi/

You have to join and volunteer (for about 2 hours once every 8 weeks), but in return you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables every week, as well as dried foods, tofu, and all ...

Contrary to popular belief (and it is incredible how popular that myth is), it really will not hurt your chances of success if you simply give them a call and ask about the status of your application. If you call the departmental secretariat on Monday, whoever answers the phone will have nothing ...

As I also hold UK ISAs, I'm interested in this question. From the UK side, the answer is clear: if you move abroad, you can no longer pay in, but you can keep an existing ISA and continue to get tax relief:

https://www.gov.uk/individual-savings-accounts/if-you-move-abroad-or-die

From the Finnish ...

Touche. And I wasn't even consistent in my misspellings. No idea where that came from, aikuis + opisto, how hard can it be

Do you have any experience with the four "Suomi Sujuvaksi" courses offered at Aikuisopisto? They are A2 level, using Suomen Mestari 2.

I am familiar with Suomen Mestari 1, which covers A1 and has 9 chapters. The Suomi Sujuvaksi courses cover two chapters per course (30 hours each), which seems very ...

Although I am in two minds about sharing those secrets (I'd still like to have a free table on my next visit), if I get tired of my office, my preferred space to work and have coffee in central Helsinki is the University Library cafe, Kaisaniemi:

http://www.helsinki.fi/kirjasto/en/library-locations ...

I'm looking for running buddies or a club for runs in or around Töölö. Most of my regular runs tend to be about 45 minutes to an hour at around 4'15"/km - 4'45"/km pace, but a little slower would be fine, too. I already know about Helsinki Running Crew, but unfortunately their hours don't really ...

I don't see a reason why you couldn't, but in all likelihood, you would have to make separate applications. PhD projects are given on a very individual and quite competitive basis, so it would be difficult to predict whether you will be successful. In general, the joint probability of landing two ...

Google Maps now (i.e. since last week) includes full offline navigation on android:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/10/9700440/google-maps-offline-navigation-search-available

Google has a somewhat patchy history with adding and removing offline functionality from Google Maps, but if you have a ...

Welcome to Finland. Sounds like we are in the same situation; I also recently started working in Finland as a researched and have a German bank account (with DKB).

So far, I've not had any problems. The University of Helsinki is paying my salary into my German account (thanks to SEPA), and I use ...

The selection of dairy products is way better here than in the UK. I could not find milk that was not homogenized in my mum's local supermarket, only Cravendale (Arla) with a sell-by date somewhere in the next decade. Here, the choice of milk is overwhelming, as is the choice of cows' milk ...

Although others have already answered both of these questions, maybe this will help clarify:

There is no "council tax" like in the UK for renting a flat in Finland. There are municipal income taxes, which, as has been explained, would have been included in the calculation.

The "additional tax" is ...

Supermarkets are not low margin businesses.

Supermarkets may charge you 20-50% more than they pay their suppliers, but that does not make them high margin businesses - the net margin will be closer to 1-2%.
Net margin means profit after tax as a fraction of total turnover. Or, as an example, for ...

Having recently lived in Germany and now Finland, the difference in food prices and prices for services is quite noticeable. The retail sector is probably less competitive in Finland compared to Germany, but even stores that sell mostly on price (e.g. Lidl) charge more for the same items here ...

With the proliferation of online shopping, and the assumption that people are usually not home when post is delivered, I can understand why the postman doesn't attempt to deliver parcels anymore. At least in my Helsinki postal district, I know my parcel will be at my local post office, which opens ...