Agnes Zolyomi's blog

As an ITN fellow, one of the cornerstones of the program is mobility. Mobility for our research, for training but also mobility for personal matters since most of us are a couple of thousand kilometers away from family and friends. However, the pandemic has come to put in question all these things that a few months ago, no one would have thought twice, like taking a train or a plane to get to your next training. Suddenly the world became so small. 

Training event 5 is what happens between two saunas, if you ask us. Check the act one of the epic saga “RECOMS goes online” if you missed our arrival to the Finnish cottage where we spent the 10 days of the fifth online training event. Our trust in life was already tested, but little we knew about what the following days had in store for us. And indeed, there was more than met the eye.

Being left without the option of leaving the country, we decided to go the Finnish way: rent a mökki (a cottage in the countryside, often the second or third or fourth house, with surrounding forests of about the size of Luxembourg and very, very, very few or preferably no neighbors. Occasionally, it may have a toilet with running water), get groceries for 2 weeks and disappear from society.