PRELIMINARY ASSIGNMENT BLA BLABLA BLA BLABLABLABLA

My name is Paula Ojala and I’m 22 years old. I love music in its every form, horror movies, coffee, cats and Chinese food. I’m not particularly fond of hospitals, traditional Finnish foods, wasps or clowns. Originally I’m from Lapland, a little town called Tornio which is located right on the border between Finland and Sweden. Currently I’m living in southern part of Finland, in Tampere, naturally due to my studies here. After passing upper secondary school with flying colors I studied music in a conservatory for three years and graduated as a “professional musician”. It may sound quite impressive, but mainly it means that the education gives basic skills to work with and produce music and also an understanding of one’s own instrument. Guitar has always been my weapon of choice. Music was and always will be my passion, a drive that keeps me going. Sad as it is I nowadays have very little energy (or time) to practice music as much as I would like to and as I used to, because the current studies do take a lot of work.

In Tampere I study hotel and restaurant business in an university of applied sciences. This is my second year studying hotel and restaurant business. The first year I did study in another town in Central Finland called Kuopio, but decided to apply for a transfer to Tampere. That decision was simply because I loved Tampere and didn’t quite felt like home in Kuopio. Now that I’ve been living here in my little one-room flat in downtown for almost a year now I love the city even more and couldn’t be happier with my decision to leave Kuopio.

After my studies I’m interested working in restaurant business. The hotel aspect of this branch doesn’t fascinate me much. I would like to work in a bar or some sort of combined pub /nightclub. One possible, ideal situation for me would be to work as a bartender during daytime, maybe some nights here and there, but to mainly work as a manager. The greatest thing would be if I had the chance to benefit my musical knowledge and be the one who books the bands and artists to that bar and to take charge about those things related otherwise. Besides this I might also be interested in marketing, but we’ll see. I’m not making any huge plans for my future yet, currently just going with the flow.

I participated in this IP-program because I think it is very important for our business to know as much as possible about culture, especially European. Meeting new people from different countries is pretty new to me, and I’m excited to communicate via foreign languages and brush up my English. I also love to travel, but hadn’t got the chance to travel that far before; apart from Sweden and Estonia I’ve never been abroad, so that part of this program was a huge bonus for me. (I think it’s a bit embarrassing that I’ve never been anywhere so thank god I got picked...)

I look really forward to the actual trip, of course. As the time draws near I believe I will be just aching to see new things, people, customs, food, beer, architecture… One of the highlights of the whole voyage will definitely be the hot-air balloon flight over Vilnius! According to our time schedule there won’t be much free time to spare, but I think the expedition will be so well planned that we don’t get the time to mourn over it too much.