This old chestnut has been doing the rounds of the Net for some time and in places it is showing its age. We have taken the liberty of adding a few glosses (for which we asked a furriner who's been here over 20 years and is therefore probably guilty of most of the behaviour being lampooned). 1.
You rummage through your plastic bag collection to see which ones you should keep to take to the store and which can be sacrificed to garbage. Apparently the plastic bags - formerly free, now costing about EUR 0.10-0.
15 - supplied by Finnish shopkeepers are vastly superior to those in other countries. It's probably something to do with the weight of bottles they need to be able to withstand. In bag-stretching competitions (don't laugh, the Finns have had dumber contests than that - most of these wacky competitions are all that the American media ever report about the place) they have allegedly outperformed most condoms currently on the market.
In any event, sales of the small black plastic bin-bags (not the BIG ones that line dustbin/garbage cans, but the little ones for in-home use) are pretty poor, and everyone uses the plastic shopping bags as temporary storage for garbage till it gets chucked out. An alternative and less attractive theory is that Finns are too cheap to consider buying shopping bags. Take your pick.
b. he is insane Err..
. isn't he? This one is getting a bit dated, really.
Nobody smiles at you on the street, but the reason is that they are too busy talking into a cellphone or downloading their e-mail from a PDA to recognize anything much more than a few feet of sidewalk immediately in front of their feet. 3. You don't think twice about putting the wet dishes away in the cupboard to dry.
Ah. Well. Now, I could tell you that dishwashers seem much more common here than in Britain, and that the British habit - the poor devils often only have that one sink and the silly two taps - of not rinsing plates before they put them to dry makes me gag, but the secret to this one is that Finnish houses and apartments have excellent draining cupboards over the sink-unit, where the plates can dry off.
No messing with a soggy tea-cloth to dry them. One great advantage of this is that the neighbours never give you Souvenir of Where-we-went tea-cloths as a gift for looking after their mail and newspapers, but something requiring a little more thought. When the plates are good and dry, you stack them in the cupboard where you keep them.
Simple, really. But in our house, the chances are that the plates and eating-irons hit the table straight from the dishwasher anyway..
. 4. A friend asks about your holiday plans and you answer: Oh, I'm going to Europe!
meaning any other Western European country outside Scandinavia. OK. Someone's got to be on the periphery.
..and we do tend to identify with the other Scandinavian countries, however much we bitch about their respective faults.
In many ways, Finland is an island. This is best seen in the fact that numerous rock bands and other artists think twice before playing Helsinki, as they will have to cart 25 truckloads of equipment by sea from Sweden and back, thus adding two or three days to their schedule for just the one gig. 5.
You see a student taking a front row seat and wonder Who does he think he is!!?
? I suppose this can only mean Finnish university students do not volunteer information for discussion at lectures. Many of them are probably asleep, and being young, have not yet perfected the technique employed by MPs, ministers and heads of state for appearing to be awake whilst dozing through meetings.
The national characteristic of polite reserve, currently being remodelled as people talk energetically into their Nokias and run up huge phone bills on mobile internet or TV chat-channels. The old stereotype of talkative as a Finn is becoming endangered as the country grows increasingly urbanised and people have to communicate. On a related note, Midsummer, a very liquid festival held at or around the Summer Solstice, contains one element that proves Finns do have a voice.
As the evening wears on, robust and inebriated males of the species engage in good-humoured shouting across lakes at one another, thus: Pekkaaaaaa, Pekkaaaa , Arskaaaaa, Arskaaa . The conversation does not usually get much further than bellowed first names, I'm afraid. In such cases, a bit of silence would be fun.
7. The reason you take the ferry to Stockholm or Tallinn is: c. to party heartily.
..no need to get off the boat in Stockholm or Tallinn, just turn around and do it again on the way back to Finland.
Finns are only mid-way up the European league table in terms of per capita alcohol consumption (6.7 litres per head of 100% alcohol a year, by comparison with the boozy sods in Luxemburg or France who drink nearly twice as much). However, the Finns are the Maurice Greens and Michael Johnsons of the drinking sport, rather than long-distance runners (which is a bit strange when you think about it, given our earlier glories at long-distance running).
Alcohol is still viewed to some extent as a forbidden fruit; even after the recent reductions, it is still rather heavily taxed, and whilst the Alko stores are increasingly pleasant and well-stocked places to shop, the truth is still that wines and spirits are not as easily available as in Central Europe. Hence (at least this is my theory and I'm sticking to it) it pays to have a decent belt of the stuff and get some benefit, if it's costing so much and is hard to come by. Sipping is for wusses.
In recent years, partly as a result of tax differentials on wine, Finns have moved from the grain and hops mentality in the direction of wine-drinking. At the same time, they have slipped closer towards a European attitude to drink - a couple of glasses on a weekday evening after work - without totally surrendering their proud national traditions of getting legless on Friday and Saturday nights and then going jogging the next morning to shake off the cobwebs. A great deal will change in May 2004, when Estonia joins the EU.
This is the reason the government brought down booze prices in March, as it was thought prudent not to encourage people to import hundreds of litres of vodka as soon as the import restrictions were lifted. It remains to be seen how well this will work.
Hey.
..the coffee's damned good here.
And we don't make a fetish out of it like the Americans have started to do. We just drink the stuff, and don't give it fancy foreign names and a huge price-tag. At least we don't drink that instant coffee muck.
News RSS