Stageblog - Yannick Schimmel - December 2024

Moi! Mina olen Yannick, and in this blog I will take you along in my 6-month internship at the Embassy of the Netherlands in Helsinki. With this blog, I hope to provide some further insights into the work the Embassy does, as well as into the daily life in the Finnish capital. I study Cybersecurity Governance at the University of Leiden, and have a background in International Relations and European Studies. This blogpost is the fourth out of six and is about the month of December.

The final weeks of 2024

December was a bit of a shorter month at work, but there were still plenty of highlights. For example, attending a 2-day conference on the Finnish/Nordic semiconductor-industry, during which my colleague and I were also able to visit several of the companies in the Helsinki region for a project on this topic. It was impressive to see their facilities and hear about their innovative chips, sensors and process technologies, which are incredibly complex. Finland is ambitious in the fields of chips and quantum-technologies, making it a very interesting research topic. 

The 10th of December was International Human Rights Day. In honor of this day we organized a film screening at Kino Regina at the Oodi library of the Dutch-Ukrainian production ‘Nice Ladies’. This film traces the lives of a Ukrainian cheerleading-team, torn apart by the outbreak of the war. In combination with the introductions by both the Dutch and the Ukrainian Ambassador, this film certainly made an impact on the audience. 

With most of the bigger events for the year having passed in November, I also had some more time to work on my research project for civil preparedness and conduct a couple more interviews.
 
Lastly, we had a very nice Christmas lunch with the team to wrap up the year. It was very nice to have this moment in the Christmas-decorated residence and with some typical Finnish food.  

Christmas in the air… 

Somehow, these blogposts always seem to include a weather-update, so to have that checked: winter has arrived in Helsinki. With sunrise at 9.25 and sunset at 15.25, the amount of daylight has become quite minimal. Temperatures do not climb above 0 frequently anymore, except for the days around Christmas where temperatures rose to +5 degrees. Fortunately, the Christmas markets, ice skating rinks and city decorations made Helsinki a great place to be in December. 

Another important moment in December for the Finns is the celebration of Independence Day (6th of December). This is celebrated with an extensive but subdued handshake ceremony with the President, for which almost everyone turns on the TV. Apart from watching the nice ceremony, the fact that it fell on a Friday this year also provided a perfect moment for a long-weekend trip to Eastern Finland :-). Together with 3 interns from other embassies, we made the 4-hour trip by car to the Punkaharju region in Finland’s Lakeland. The frozen lakes and snow-covered trees made this a true Winter Wonderland experience. We spent the weekend in a typical Finnish cottage, right next to one of the many lakes. It was great to experience this ‘other’ Finland, outside of the capital region. 

After spending the holidays in the Netherlands, there are fortunately still two more months of my internship left. Until the next blog!