I’ve travelled a bit, and while meeting people from different nationalities, they all have a different outlook on Finland but still share some mutual aspects. I thought I’d look into Finnishness from what I’ve heard from foreigners , and present few things here that describes Finnishness for me too.
Nature.
Nature is one aspect that defines Finnishness to me. We’re all born, well, in the middle of the forest. Our nature is amazing. A girl from France was surprised when I told I was from Finland: “Oh, that’s a beautiful country, you have all those fjords there!” … Or few people I met in Japan “We have something in common in our nature too! We both have hot springs!”
No, we don’t have fjords or hot springs in Finland, but we do have millions of lakes, different kinds of forests, and amazing landscapes with some mountains in Lapland. We do not have any big mountains, that are part of many other countries landscapes, and many foreign friends have been really surprised of the flatness of Finland. We have that big, big forest, that spreads throughout the land, and just little towns here and there. Maybe you could come across even a moose.
Cold.
The second thing everybody seems to know about Finland is that it’s always cold in here. An older Japanese gentleman started talking to me in German, assuming I was from Germany. When he realized, I was from Finland, “Oh, really cold, hrr”, didn’t even bother to explain that actually, it’s not always cold, just went with it. Well, we are up north, and most of the year we don’t get much sunlight. But we’re always waiting for that miracle that summer would be warm and not so rainy. (And we always end up cursing how bad this summer was, again.)
Equal opportunities.
Third thing that everybody always seems to mentions is the Finnish school system, one of the best in the world. And I agree. We all have equal opportunity to study and become (almost) anything we want. Our education is free (and we also get paid for studying, thanks Kela!), and that’s one rare and amazing thing.
Finnishness is so much more than nature, climate and equal opportunities, but these are some things that first came to my mind.
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