Erasmus program is really great, I think that the most important think in this kind of project is share multicultural information and experience. This experience has helped me to act, react, organize, compare myself with an environment completely different. From this point of view, after being in contact with different European and international cultures in a such different context like the Finnish one, I feel really more mature, more independent, flexible, more than stronger.
But culture shock’s effect is so strange and unconscious field of life: Values, beliefs, attitudes, history, climate, religions, family type, norms and law, geography, languages, idioms, gender, regional and ethnic habits, gender, social classes, age, profession, cultural background, personal experience… what other adjectives have I to add? And the levels of awareness of culture? We usually don’t take care on it but every second that we pass in our life we get new experiences, from whatever surround us, it’s so incredible. And in a foreign context you have, as I think you know, from your past how many inputs you can receive in your day life!
I tried from the first moment I have been in Finland to walk the way of the process of adapting in another culture, made by flexibility, tolerance, compromising, empathy, ethnocentrism, awareness, understanding, acceptance (some time really, really hard), respect, selecting and adapting the experience to my culture and trying to bring part of my culture in front of the other, trying to eliminate my stereotypes and create my own view in a dynamic way.
The satakunta polytechnic in Rauma has been more than a single event. it's not important wherever you go in erasmus. The most important think is that you go.
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