On jo alkanut, ja en ole siellä. Toivottavasti pärjäätte hyvin (nöh, tiedän jo). Täällä on vaan pilvistä ja sateista. Eilen näin joku mainos telkkarissa jossa joku kaveri hiihtia, ja minulle tuli ikävä. En mä usko että muiden on helppoa ymmärtää miten hyvältä hiihtaminen voi tuntua. Ehkä jos pystyn jäämän Suomeen kauemmaksi aikaa voisin mennä kilpailemaan, hehehe.
Tag Archives: finland
Racism and “otherness”
Yesterday, after finishing a company visit our class took the bus back to school. We were more than 20, and in the bus we were of course speaking English, as it is our only lingua franca. You can imagine our surprise when some kids (the oldest one was probably 15) started shouting stuff at us from the back of the bus in English. After ignoring them for a while, they switched their verbal abuse to Dutch and French, at which point I got very annoyed as it was mostly directed towards the girls in the class. We continued to ignore them (and I have to admit that I had to restrain myself a couple of times) until we reached our destination, but it was around 40 minutes of intense bullying.
It was worthless to waste my time on those kids (who, by the way, also seemed to be from an Arab immigrant background), but I couldn’t answer in their language properly, which is a handicap, and physical action is completely out of the question. I was also not very happy with the fact that this can happen here (I’ve heard it’s a problem in France too)
Discussing this situation with the Chinese guys in our group, I was dismayed to hear that it is not uncommon for them to get that kind of treatment. I have had problems a couple of times (In Finland I was called “vitun turkkilainen” twice, had problems once with a bouncer in a bar since closed and once a 15-year-old try to spit on me while skating, whereas here I’ve been asked twice if I’m Maghrebi in a hostile voice) but it was rather uncommon. In Finland that behaviour in a city bus wouldn’t happen as kids are educated differently, whereas in Mexico they would probably get their asses handed to them anyway.
I know it’s a chicken and egg situation, in the sense that bad treatment from one side will cause bad treatment from the other, but I can’t help to feel pissed off by this behaviour. I don’t expect everyone to live “happily ever after”, but that is just not acceptable, regardless of who does it.
Things that I’ve learned/discovered in Finland
- Silence is fun.
- Sauna is fun.
- Skiing cross-country for 20 kilometres is fun.
- Going on a Sunday ice-skating in the frozen sea to have a picnic in an island at -20 °C is a lot of fun.
- Not being able to sleep in summer is fun… and Juhannus (midsummer) is a lot of fun, regardless of whether you spend it with family or friends.
- Salmiakki (salty licorice) rules!
- Piimä (sour milk) is evil.
- I understand why Finnish has no future tense and no gender differentiation, but it has lots of words for sauna, for snow and for weird things like kaamos. Your reality determines your language, and vice versa.
- To walk in the snow and the icy sidewalks… and only fell twice! One included such a nice ukemi that I didn’t break anything, heh.
- You can have good friends without talking with them about anything.
- You can go local without knowing it.
- November is not fun, but pikkujoulut are.
Suomalaisuus epä-suomalaisille
Nyt kun olen ollut ulkomailla olen huomannut että olen ehkä ennemmän suomalainen kuin olisin edes ajatellut. Jätän kengät eteiseen, hikoilen koko ajan koska on liian kuuma minulle ja olen ollut tosi yllättynyt että olut voi olla niin hyvää ja halpaa. Kun olen koulussa suomalaisten kanssa tuntuu hyvältä ja kun kuuntelen suomea kadulla hymyilen tsekseni. En tiedä vielä mitä on minulle tapahtunut, mutta kuusi vuotta on pitkä aika, ja se näkyy. En ajatele itseäni vain meksikolaisena, mutta en voi oikeasti sanoa että olen jotain muuta kuin joku tyyppi joka asui Suomessa kauan ja jolla on nyt, ulkomailla, vähän Suomi-ikävä.
Joka tapauksessa, ei ole niin ikävä että voisin juoda piimää. Salmari on tervetullut.
“Those dirty foreigners!”
Posted when I lived in Finland.
I’ve always tried to consider myself an open person, and have tried to receive and analyse new ideas as they come. I was reading Tecosgirl’s blog and it reminded me of some things that have happened to me throughout the years.
The first one was when I was 17, we were invited to debate to the Harvard Model United Nations, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. As a high school senior, I was very excited to go to debate in that “temple of education”, and to match my skills with the people there. You can imagine our surprise when we reached the place. Imagine the following conversation in a circle upon entering a conference room before the actual sessions start:
Boy 1: “So, where are you guys from?”
Boy 2: “Well, I’m from Rhode Island.”
Girl 1: “We’re from California.”
Boy 3: “We came from Florida.”
And so on and so forth until it was our turn to say: “We’re from Mexico City.”, point at which the rest of the group would turn around and leave. Not because we spoke with a funny accent or anything, but because we were Mexican and we were at the same level as those kids. It got even “better”, as the topic that we discussed was the Taleban government in Afghanistan (you have to picture that this is 3 years or so before Sept. 11), and the Afghanistan delegate was agreeing with the United States, and everybody else cheered them on while we said that it was just a completely unrealistic position (a.k.a. bollocks). Most of my delegation who did the trip with me left the sessions as a lost cause and spent the rest of the trip going around Boston, but I still tried to instill some sense, with no success. That experience made me change my goal from studying in the US to studying in Europe.
Some years later, I moved to study Engineering in Finland. While I have to say that I really love this country (otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed here), have generally found acceptance after proving myself, and have a family and friends that truly own a place in my heart, I have found a couple of examples of people that react to (my appearance, my being?) with marked discontent, especially among the older generation and the less educated. Why? Because they don’t know where I’m from by looks only (I’ve been told that I’m half Thai, half Finnish, that I’m Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Arab…) and, let’s face it, there’s not that many of my countrymen here (around 180 last time I heard). I don’t have it that bad at all either, some of my black friends have told me worse stories .
Then there is Mexicans as well. We tend to receive foreigners with gusto, but are also quite reticent to fully accept them. The latest controversy has been about Naturalised Mexicans in the football (soccer) national team (I’ve posted about it already). Then there are reactions like those that Koreans get in Mexico City, where they’re charged with being the crime bosses of the Tepito area. Or the sterotype of Americans in Mexico as being pale, blonde, untrustworthy and stupid. As they say in Spanish, en todos lados se cuecen habas, loosely translated as shit happens everywhere.
Our biggest problem as a society (or societies) is that even though we’re becoming more and more part of a globalised world and there are more and more interconnections between the different parts, places, countries and people, we understand very little, if anything, of each other, the little that we know is usually clouded by stereotypes, and saddest of all, there seems to be no will in our societies, in us, to change.