I rented out my apartment to an Erasmus student who came originally from Germany and had begun her studies in Zurich Switzerland, my home town. She came to do her Erasmus at Aalto and was bad-mouthing Switzerland very much, how racist Swiss people are, which I do acknowledge since I grew up in a multicultural family in German-Speaking Switzerland. I told her that alas, she would most likely encounter similar experiences here in Finland, as I had been living in Helsinki for roughly 3 years at that time and gone through some very nasty things e.g. people spitting at me, telling me to speak Finnish not German (once I took a call from a Swiss friend in public, very bad decision). Of course people are entitled to their own oppinion, but I believe that nobody has the right to belittle other people’s experience and deny the fact that there are racist elements in Finnish society.