The Price of Living

The transport pass, for one month in the whole Helsinki area ("Pääkaupunkiseutu", meaning the "Capital area", including Espoo and Vantaa) costs 100€ per month. Helsinki alone is 50€/month.
Thankfully, the student prices are half of these prices! So it should be 50€ for a month in the Helsinki area and 25€ for Helsinki alone.

Be careful though: these student prices only apply to students currently studying in a Finnish university. If you are a student in another country, even with an international student card, they will not apply to you and you will have to pay full price. Sad, I know.

For the Laurea students: the university is 8 minutes walk from the center of Espoo, so depending where your flat is, you might not even need a transport card !

Concerning single subway/tram/bus tickets, they cost about 3€ during the day, and 5,50€ by night.

The official website for Helsinki public transportation is https://www.hsl.fi/en.

The supermarkets are a bit more expensive than in France (Paris), but it’s not a huge difference either.
Same for restaurants - both regular/classy and fast food.

I will try and remember to update this article with concrete examples of food prices once I’m in Finland.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the difficult part.

Movies are gonna be the worst I think. In France, you can have your ticket for 4/6€ as a student. In Helsinki, you should count between 13 and 16€. Yup. That’s almost the price of my unlimited card for one month. Just thinking of all the awesome movies coming out next year…​ ouch !
The most well known movie theaters are named "Finnkino" and those are their prices.

Then we have the alcohol. It’s not getting better, folks. If I remember correctly (once again, I will update once I checked) a pint of beer is about 6/10€. Or was it less than a pint ? I only remember that it was shockingly expensive.
If you buy alcohol in a shop - probably in Alko, cf. the article about alcohol - it will still be expensive. The cheapest bottles of wine are about 7/10€, and sure it’s better wine than the French cheapest bottles but still.

I have no idea of the prices of night clubs in France - or elsewhere - because the only time I went in one was in Helsinki. Well, there it was 12€ to get in, which stings when you’re used to enter into a bar for free.

Apparently, most Erasmus students take phone cards with only the 3G/4G and use message apps (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.) to communicate.
The students who told me about this said the prices for such cards should be about 35€ for 6 months unlimited, or 6,5€ per month. They didn’t remember the brand of those cards, which makes the advice a bit useless.
DNA has this type of cards too, but for 16,90€ per month.

From what I saw, the prices of clothes, video games etc. is about the same in Finland as it is in France.