Being a Finnish abroad

While traveling long time abroad, not meeting any people from your homeland, makes you think why you feel togetherness with people who come from same area as you, even thought you are still strangers to each others? My opinion is that you can feel the same with anyone, from anywhere in the world, because of other reasons, like same kind of interests or past or anything..

But still there is something special when you can start to speak your own language after a long time, talk about recent news from Finland and maybe have common friends or special places back at home. I think for Finnish people specially this is important, because we are such a small country, foreign people don’t always know much about us, and meeting another Finnish far away might be sometimes really rare.

Street food in Vietnam. Made me feel homesick to my home town Rauma.

My favorite memory about this subject is, when I was travelling in South East Asia. At the time I had traveled for about 1,5 months, and meeting only one Finnish before this. So there I was, in Thailand, traveling from Koh Tao to Bangkok by ferry and night bus. When we got to bus, somehow there was me, two girls traveling together, and two guys, all at the back of bus. We chatted for a while, and when it got late we could say good night in Finnish. That felt really special and made me feel cozy in this really uncomfortable bus.

Some personality traits that I appreciate especially in Finns, are honesty, accuracy and keeping what they promise. Sometimes you can hear that Finnish people are shy, even rude for strangers. But I think it depends on you. If you smile to Finnish people, they will smile back, if you ask for help, they sure will help you.

Sometimes while travelling, you can find something really silly that only you can understand. Here is one good example I found from South Korea.