Kyösti asked (about my fear of getting robbed in the bus):
One thing about the buses: are you completely serious about the level of danger as far as getting robbed and whatnot? I wonder if there would be some stats or something about this (sorry, too damn lazy to google.)
Well, I've seen on TV many of those cases of people getting robbed in the bus, and at least Jana told me that it happened to her once, even though that was some 10 years ago. Those occurrences are, of course, more common in the poorer areas of the city, though there was a shooting in a bus once that killed a person somewhere in the downtown area.
A quick Google search showed me a piece of news from July 2009 that says that:
The number of robberies in buses [...] increased from 377 to 685 and it was 81% higher than in 2008. The statistics compare the occurrences in the first semester of 2008 and 2009.
So, in the first six months of 2009, there were 685 robberies in buses in my city (which has a population of around 2.5 million). I don't think it is a negligible number, but, as I said, it happens mostly in the poorer areas of the city.
Leaving the safety issue aside (which hasn't affected me yet, and hopefully never will) I am quite okay with how things have been working out for me so far. I thought it was going to be harder. I still don't have a working bus schedule in hands, but the buses are frequent enough that they suit my needs. I do need to allow for longer connection times, as I depend way too much on luck to catch the buses. Today I had to wait for the bus for half an hour, because I left work a bit later than usual and probably managed to miss at once two buses that were going to my destination.
Oh, and I now have a bus card that works very well and can be recharged online :)