One of the funniest student traditions here in Turku: wearing overalls and collecting patches. Before we came here to Turku, we were already prepared by our tutors through our exchange-student-whatsapp-group: They sent us pictures, on which they wore these colorful overalls, with thousands of patches attached. We thought "strange" at the beginning and didn't know exactly what the whole thing was supposed to be. But when we arrived here in Turku, we immediately saw hundreds of students wearing these colorful overalls with thousands of patches on them. Immediately we asked ourselves if the different colors had different meanings.
It's probably a long tradition that students buy an overall and get different patches at different events, collect them and sew them on their overalls. It's also supposed to be the "official" party outfit, but we've seen "normally" dressed students at every party so far, so don't worry if you don't want to buy one. Every university or faculty has its own color. Since we're studying here at Novia UAS in the business faculty, our color is pink. Maybe not the coolest or the most stylish colour for everyone, but who cares? :)
You can get patches everywhere. At parties, events, various excursions or you can simply buy them. What have we noticed from all this tradition? First of all everything is totally right and exactly how Liza, one of our tutors, told us: Almost every student has their own overall, you can find patches everywhere and the most amazing thing is: each overall is unique.
Personally all of us decided against buying such an overall. Why? One of the sad reasons is that we'll only be here for a few months and unfortunately we won't be able to collect as many patches to cover the whole overall and look cool enough. And furthermore, we probably won't wear them back in our home countries anymore, because we'll be the only ones and may look ridiculous.
BUT, what we did: We still collect all kinds of patches and sew them onto our jute bag. It looks pretty cool on the one hand and on the other hand, it is a really nice memory of our time here in Turku at Novia UAS and we can still use them back in our home countries.