Finnish Impressions
Last week marked my first visit to Finland. Working for Nokia I – of course – expected this to happen sometime, I just had not foreseen that it would take more than two years before my first visit.
My visit was to the northern Finnish city of Oulu. Oulu is about 600 km from Helsinki, and only 200 km from the Polar Circle. This is very clear since the sun rises after 9 in the morning, and goes down already at a quarter to 3 in the afternoon.
I don’t know what my expectations were from Finland, but below are my impressions and thoughts on my few days in Oulu.
I had of course been warned that winter in northern Finland can be hellish. There were tales of frost on the inside of taxi windows, of temperatures where you only went outside if extremely urgent. It was therefore a bit of a letdown when I got off the plane and, although there was snow, it was just above freezing. The snow has been melting fast since I arrived, and it has turned into an ice glazing of the sidewalks with big (HUGE) puddles on the roads (especially where the crosswalks go, I don’t know why it always works like that). Fortunately, the weather turned during my last night in Oulu, and I woke up Friday morning to find the town covered in a fine dusting of snow. It is much prettier than the grey autumny type weather.
Worth noting on the temperature thing, all buildings have double doors that form a little air lock. I guess that is indicative that it does get cold sometimes. Over lunch some of the people I was visiting told me that it usually gets really cold in October, like -20 degrees centigrade, and then warmer again until around Christmas which is almost always white. Then the snow stays with really cold weather until end of March.
Another “feature” of Oulu being so northern is that it is dark almost all the time (as I wrote above). At Christmas there is only about 3 and a half hours of daylight which is enough to depress anyone. However, it seems to simply make the Finns more productive. I guess they have nothing to do, but work all the time.
Of course, this means it has been dark when I walked around downtown Oulu. Because of the darkness there is one thing I noticed, almost none uses lights on their bicycles. There are a lot of bikes around, but almost noone with lights on.
Although the Finnish language is almost unique (the Finno-Ugric family of languages is a quite select bunch) the sound is familiar if you know nordic languages. I know almost no Finnish, but walking around in downtown Oulu I kept feeling like I should understand the conversations I overheard. It does mean that I wish I knew more Finnish, what little I do know is mostly useless as shown in the list below, although knowing some numbers has proven very useful.
- Juustoleipä – Grilled or pan fried fresh cheese
- Lauantaimakkara – Saturday sausage (literally), the Finnish equivalent to Falukorv appearantly (couldn’t find a wikipedia entry for Lauantaimakkara)
- Moi – Hi
- Latauslista – Download chart/list
I mean, how lousy is that, I don’t even know how to say yes, no, and thank you. I guess I have a task to do before my next visit. Then again, that might be in two years, so I don’t need to hurry.