So says my hairdresser, and I think he is right. Someone spoke to me in the elevator in our building last week and I was so shocked I almost didn't know how to respond. Then I realized the man was Chinese and staying in a University apartment like us. I guess no one told him about Finnish elevator etiquette.
He told me another joke, too. This one is about the Finnish Easter delicacy of Mammi, a mushy-textured thing made of rye malt and rye flour (my conclusion on tasting it was that one would have to like beer to consider liking mammi. I am not a fan of beer, nor mammi.).
Anyway, here's the joke that my hairdresser's children say about mammi and other dark Finnish food: People think Finns are so poor that we have to eat our food twice! (Here's a nice post by another blogger if you want to read more about mammi: http://arcticrainbow.blogspot.com/2010/04/sacred-mammi-finnish-easter-food.html)So now we know that scatological jokes are funny in other cultures, too.
While he was on a roll of self-deprecating Finnish humor my hairdresser also told me about how older Finns are very interested (concerned?) to know what foreigners think of Finland. "And they don't what to hear about the cold, the dark, and the silent people, either!" I really had to laugh about this because I have been asked twice in almost identical words What do you like most about Finland?
The question confounds me because the words "like" and "Finland" don't usually occur in my head at the same time. OK, that is an exaggeration. There are lots of little things I like about Finland - the toilets are all duel flush, the hot water in the shower is instant, the sauna's are great - but I suspect they are expecting larger answers, something more like "I love the architecture, the weather, the food, the people." Or at least they might expect ONE of those things. But truly, none of these come to the top of my 'like' list, some of them I downright 'dis-like'.
Mostly, being here is interesting.
It is interesting to live without a car and it is great that this is a pretty easy city for doing that (and that LOTS of people do that).
Experimenting with new foods is interesting but I am getting tired of having such a sparsely equipped kitchen for said experiments.
It is interesting to be the foreigner, to feel lost and confused and amused by so many things, to notice how much mental energy it takes to take care of the basic details of our lives, to imagine what it is like to be a foreigner in the US.
But like????
About Jyvaskyla one of Charles' colleagues says "It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit here!" We sort of live here and are sort of visitors, which just may be the worst situation.
This all sounds much more morose than I feel right now. Today is warm (mid 40's) and sunny, tonight I am singing with the Lutherans and this weekend we have a birthday party to go to. Today I feel connected. But those other thoughts above weave in and out of my days here so I decided to give them a little space to come out.
Much more than the "What do you like about Finland" question, I really like the question a friend asked me this weekend: What will you be taking away with you from your time in Finland? I don't think I'll be able to really answer that until we've been home for a while. More than anything, I have probably learned a lot about myself. Being here has been hard in many ways, but I am glad we did it. I just might even want to try it again for Charles' next sabbatical.
