Housing and transport

Housing and transport: to find accommodation the easiest way is to contact the (almost unique) Kuopas agency. (There are also other agencies that offer flat but without any furniture, they will cost less but you have to buy everything, also be careful because not all the apartments of kuopas are furnished.) The procedure is quite simple, you just need to go to their website and send a request choosing some preferences (ex. place, price, number of roommates), these requests are not always satisfied but the houses are still very good on average. The area where the “international students” usually live is Rahualati (Katiskaniementie) which is about 3km from the University (UEF) and 5km from the city centre. One of the most used means of transport are bicycles and you can easily find a second-hand one in some local store (ask your Finnish tutors) or on the facebook group "Kisa student marketplace" (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1664993847106161/ ? ref = bookmarks) where various students living in kuopio sell their second-hand stuff to cheap prices (you can do the same when you have to leave, if you do not want to simply donate your stuff for free to the university for future students). If you are not particularly sporty, like me, you can buy the monthly bus ticket which costs a little less than € 40 and you can recharge it online. Alternatively you can buy only the card and upload money on it (more convenient then buy the ticket directly on the bus, because if you want to make the ticket on the bus it costs much more and they only accept cash, € 3.30 against € 1.70 with a card ). The bus connection is quite efficient, there is one almost every half hour from Rahualati to the city centre and to the university (The number 7). The last bus in the evening from the centre is at 2.15 (it is not the number 7 but the 16, but it’s still very close and usually full of other students that will walk your same way). To see bus timetables, a very useful website / app is kuopio.digitransit.fi.

Another area where a lot of international students (and not) live is Puijonlasko (in particular Kuntukuja). From here there are not a lot of buses but most of the people I've known walked from there to everywhere. From the university it is quite ok, there are about 10/15 minutes on foot (although on the way back you have to walk uphill), while from the city centre it is a little more distant: 40min or 1h if you are drunk (as I was told ahaha). Personally, I would never have been able to do all that road in the night and in the cold, but anyway it is possible to be done. The apartments in this area are more expensive (350 € or more) but also much larger, great for home parties that in Rahualati are very difficult to do because you can not fit more than a dozen people in there.