It's still generally good to live here as all the services I want for now are rather nearby and relatively cheap, but...
KIT campus is sad as it's just bunch of scattered buildings. In LUT of Lappeenranta, everything is nicely in one building making it more or less like a big home where you meet people from different schools and branches of science. In LUT everybody more or less go in every day trough the same main doors and pass the big dining hall or stay there for coffee or whatsoever. In KIT my 5 courses take place in 5 different buildings. There are no other visible activities happening during the same time so you won't see other people during breaks or just idling in the hallways excluding a few exceptions. It's yet different thing that does seeing other people actually lead to interaction but at least it feels more warm than just lurking into the lecture and sneaking out when it's already dark at streets with the other 30 course mates or so. Of course LUT hosts only for about 5000 students whereas KIT has 25 000 but still.. matter of design.
The big dining hall is also a separate building and certainly a cross-faculty meeting place, but it boasts huge queues during peak hours and nutritionally poor food (I wouldn't complain about taste though, but that ain't important factor for me anyway). Yeah you guessed it.. library is separate building also, like just everything.
Facilities are old and small, and poor. Maybe I was under too much expectations thinking of Germans as the ultimate masters of technology and efficiency and everything... well they are, they invent a lot, but they are terrible at implementing. Buildings are ages old and energy-inefficient, have barely nothing smart inside (ok wohoo there are projectors!), some headband microphones are clearly just coming as one professor tried to use some silly neckband with old school hand mic hanging from it producing zero amplification to sound, but luckily found himself a modern and working one after probably facing some feedback. Many classes or lecture halls seem to seriously lack electricity sockets as they clearly are from era before major break trough of laptops (or maybe they are just ahead of their time and anticipate leap in battery technology). One class keeps hardheadedly on taking place in such a class room where about 10 people (out of 40) don't have access to table.
Computers are scarce and sticky. For some reason first time when I used computer here in one computer class it was amazingly fast! I was impressed... only to find out that it was probably broken. All the later sessions on computer has been blood pressurizing experiences of pure hell thanks to many systematic internet failures (other computers experienced same problems simultaneously). During peak hours it's also rather troublesome task to find any free computer anywhere. Printing is cheap, some 3-4 cents for double sided black/white sheet, but only at central printer. You usually have to wait 0.5-2 hours because it has processing queue. And then you will fetch your finished print-work from a locker with student id indications. Somewhat complex but yeah works anyway. If you order many printouts, the central printer combines whatever orders it has received from you probably up to the point when it's your work's turn in the queue. They all come stapled together. So better to order one course's all available material one day and another's other day... If you don't have a nice heavy stapler at home. You can also print double sided at every computer class and there are not much queue but it costs some 6 cents a paper. I think in LUT printing costs 5-6 cents/sheet and every work can be chosen to be individually stapled and punctured for mapping. Here you have to puncture your own holes, even central printer doesn't have the option.
Earning ECTS feels mainly more laborious here than in LPR. These courses have quite a lot content, but on the other hand they are new to me and I probably don't have some of the base knowledge that some other students may have as these are master level courses. Anyway, you may expect to work rather hard here to survive. One course, namely Entrepreneurship, has proved to be incredibly boring bla bla bla course with no new insights. Others are still rather interesting and demanding.
Germans still don't use blinkers of their cars'! ..just saying.
Otherwise I seem to miss animals and nature here. In Finnish cities nature with exhaustive (soft surface) jogging routes are always relatively near. Here for some freaking reason they have asphalted paths in these few tiles of forest in central city. I guess one just has to humbly take some 10-15 min tram-trip to outskirts if willing to go run into real forest without asphalt.
Next week I'm off to Malaga and Granada, Spain, to relax a bit and a week after that seems to be snowboarding trip to Austria. Christmas is good time to recap the courses.. right?
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