Seventh meeting (Robin and Heini) - Culture and customs

From this meeting on, we won’t be talking about the language anymore but instead, we will focus on the culture.

In a first place, Heini told me a little bit about what Finnish people were like.

What are Finnish people like?

From my point of view (based on Frenchy who has been to Finland), I thought that Finns were grumpy, quiet and did’t really talk to strangers and finally they liked having their personal space. As a matter of fact, Heini agreed with me on most of these points but she came up with a more elaborated list:

• Finns are jealous of each other and meddle into each other’s businesses. They even have a saying in Finland: “Finnish neighbour would pay 100 euros so that his neighbour wouldn’t get 50 euros”. I think that was funny!
• They love their personal space (Heini does it too!). And they don’t need to talk to each other or their neighbours.
• Heini thinks that Finns are not that grumpy. She thinks that it depends on the person you are talking to. (I can relate to that as well which French people)
• Finns don’t hug and kiss when they meet (she even said that she would feel very uncomfortable if she had to hug someone when meeting).
• Finns are very stubborn people.
• Finns are really patriotic.

Finnish culture

• Sauna is their life force.
• She said “Our Sauna culture is one thing I really enjoy. We go to sauna naked, and we don’t find it weird. It’s very common to have a beer or soda with you in sauna as a “sauna drink”. In sauna you use Vihta, which is sort of whip made from branches, to hit yourself on the back with it”. I found it very interesting as a French person to get to know this part of the culture. 
• Finn’s love drinking and it’s a big part of our culture. We have this thing called little Saturday that we spend on Wednesdays. (Apparently it’s just another reason to drink haha).
• Their culture is also lot about nature, and they all have a very deep connection with nature.
• In their culture, it’s common to have your immediate family close to you but they don’t really keep contact with their extended families. For examples, Heini hasn’t seen her cousins for years.

 

Here is what I managed to come up with regarding the French culture.  

What are French people like? 

There are so many clichés about French people but, I’ll start things off with a list of the positive character traits. 

I would say that French people are: 

• Elegant: I think it’s part of the culture to look classy / good and I know that a lot of foreigners think this way.  
• Joyful: French people love going to restaurants and cafés and enjoy a good meal with wine / cheese and friends. We love eating and drinking a lot in France, everything can be a motive to go out and have a drink / dinner, we really like celebrating. (I feel like this is a common thing regardless the country or culture). We also love the “aperitif” which is basically a time where you start eating and drinking before dinner (after the “aperitif” you’re usually a little tipsy).
• Good-natured: I would say that a lot of French people are really nice and convivial.
• Open-minded: I’d say that French people are becoming more and more open-minded nowadays but it hasn’t always been like this (if you come to France, you’ll see that the past generations are rather close-minded, which I think is lame).  
• Social: We love interacting with people.

Now I’ll list the not so positive aspects: 

• Grumpy: sometimes French people can be a little grumpy and complain about everything but it usually doesn’t last very long. 
• Undisciplined / unruly: That is a fact, we’re not very good at following the rules. For instance, if you happen to be at a pedestrian crossing and the light is red and there isn’t so much car around, you will see pretty much everyone crossing the street… In fact, even if there is a lot of cars sometimes.  Here is another example (still on the road); if you’re about to take an exist on the motorway and there are cars queuing, you will see other cars trying to take this exist at the latest moment possible (overtaking all the cars obviously). 
•  Coarse / Vulgar: This doesn’t mean that French people are not educated but we do say quite a lot of swearwords without even noticing sometimes)
• Not very good at languages: I think we managed to build ourselves a bad reputation for languages and it’s a fact, there are a lot of French people that cannot say a word in English or very little making a conversation a little tricky sometimes (or in any other language). 

Now, here is a couple of fun facts about French culture.

French culture (fun facts)  

• We love restaurants, food, cheese, wine… indeed, this is part of the culture (Not for everyone though, I’m not a big fan of cheese and red wine). 
• France is the most popular tourist destination in the world. 
• France is the largest country in the EU.
• We have lots of landmarks and historical monuments because history is very important in France. 
• Nuclear plant account for 71% of the electricity production. (Renewables account for 22% and fossil fuels for 7%). 
• France has a lot of railways; you can cross the country pretty easily by train and public transportation is pretty good in big cities. Though, in rural areas, it is not so good (only buses every now and then)
• Family dinners in France last for ever. (it’s common to start eating at 12:00 and finish at 16:00 or 17:00 because we have a lot to eat and we make pauses). Luckily, it’s only a few times in the year.  
• We have something called “la bise” which is weird for a foreigner but when we meet someone (that we know but not necessarily) we give each other a kiss on the cheek (it’s either two kisses or three depending on the region of France).

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this meeting because we learnt a lot about each other’s culture and I really liked our discussion as well. I tried to summarize as best as I could what went down during this meeting but I’m sure I forgot some things because we talked a lot.

I think this was the best session so far because we talked about each other’s culture in a natural way. We also gave some examples and personal experiences which I think made the whole thing a lot more interesting.

After this meeting, I really felt like I had learnt a lot about the finnish culture. (And if it wasn’t through this course, I don’t think I would’ve had the opportunity to exchange and learn about the Finnish culture).