Stageblog – Floortje Molenaar – September/October 2026

Hei hei! Minä olen Floortje, and in this blog I will take you along on my 6-month internship at the Embassy of the Netherlands in Helsinki. Through this blog, I hope to offer some insight into the work the Embassy does, as well as into daily life in the Finnish capital. I study Crisis and Security Management at Leiden University and have a background in International Management of Social Challenges.
My first month as an intern at the Netherlands Embassy in Helsinki is already behind me, and to be honest, it feels as though I've been here much longer. Time, then, to tell you a little about my first weeks at the embassy in Helsinki.

Finding my feet

Before the real work began, I had a few days to get to know the city. My first mission was a bowl of salmon soup down by the harbour at Keisarinnankivi. Fortified by a generous, wonderfully creamy helping, I boarded the ferry to Suomenlinna, the old sea fortress just off the coast, where you can wander among ancient walls, cannons and battle-worn ruins, or settle onto one of the little rocky beaches and take in the view across the Gulf of Finland. To round off a perfect first weekend, I decided to end it the Finnish way: in the sauna. It's an enormous part of Finnish culture, and so is the ritual that comes with it, swapping the heat for a bracing dip in cold water and back again.

Straight into the deep end

On my first day at the embassy, I was welcomed so warmly that my nerves quickly gave way to a great deal of curiosity. On my third day I felt ready to head out on my own.  I attended a roundtable at the finish ministry of foreign affairs about the preparation for the UN Water Conference 2026. It gave me a close-up view of how a subject of that scale is actually discussed in practice.

Less than a week later, I found myself in an entirely different corner of diplomacy: courtside at a European Volleyball Championship match between Finland and the Netherlands, seated in the VIP section next to the director of the Finnish Volleyball Federation. When I started this internship, I could never have imagined that my family and friends back home would spot me on television during the live broadcast in only my second week.

That variety turned out to be typical. One day I was surrounded by sports fans; shortly afterwards I was at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum for the opening of an exhibition on the Bentvueghels, the Dutch and Flemish painters who gathered in Rome in the seventeenth century. Later in the month I could be found at Oodi, perhaps the most beautiful and vibrant library in the city, reading a passage from Alice in Wonderland on behalf of the Netherlands. I also attended two EU Council briefings this month. They were technical sessions, but genuinely interesting, and it was rather funny to find friends from other embassies in the city sitting across the table from me.

One morning I joined a startup breakfast at the Hungarian Embassy, which proved incredibly relevant to my internship project, the assignment I'll be working on over the coming months. More on that in future posts.

Between all these events and meetings away from the office, I also spent plenty of time within its walls. There were countless getting-to-know-you coffees, and hardly a day goes by without a delegation visiting someone on the team, so boredom is not really an option. I also got to spend a morning shadowing @Renske at the consular desk, which was so insightful that I realized I had some paperwork of my own to sort out 😊 

What strikes me most is just how much happens at an embassy all at once. Just ask @Mayane. Alongside her role as operations manager, she is overseeing the renovation of both the ambassador’s residence, Villa Kleineh, and the embassy itself. So in between the political reporting and the trade relations, there are paintings to be measured and furniture to be moved to the temporary office. Never a dull moment! Everyone had warned me that September is a busy month, and they were right. Even so, there's always time for a chat over coffee. People are genuinely interested in one another and want to hear what you got up to at the weekend. I'm showered with tips on what to see, eat and do, and I've even started bonding with my neighbours in the sauna. I think it's official: I'm going native.

On to month two!