Suomi (Finland)

I have been to Helsinki, stayed in Matinkyla in Espoo, and tomorrow I will take a train to Tampere. Finland is nothing if not for its standard of living, hospitality, and of course, saunas that burn away all your worry.

Arriving on Monday afternoon on a direct flight from Warsaw, I was immediately struck by two things: I blended physically and secondly, people would start speaking Finnish to me when I approached them with a question.

True, I'm 50% Finnish, but unfortunately, it doesn't mean I know the language. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's next to impossible for a non-native speaker to actually learn the language if they had no exposure over the age of 12.

Part of the Finno-Ugric language family, which includes Hungarian (however, incredibly distant from Finnish), but little or no answers to the language's finalized usage are available. It has little, if any, Slavic influence from the East and very little influence from the West, Sweden. The closest relative of the language is Estonian, which indeed makes sense geographically. But Estonian sits out there like Finnish, having little traceable lineage of development.

For a large part, the Finns have historically spent much of their time as a nation staving off occupation. And if it wasn't Sweden, it was Russia. Disputed leadership of Finland signed a treaty with the Nazis around the start of World War II believing this would greatly aid in their efforts to hold back the Russians who kept massing at the border. During the conflict, 60,000 Finns died, while the Russians withstood over a Million deaths. Finnish literature produced a tongue-in-cheek joke related to this: one Finn is worth 50 Russians, but what of the 51st Russian?

Not to mention, after the US (allegedly) sent over armaments and munitions to help to Russians fight the Nazis, they turned around and used them against the Finns.

Today Finland is the home of many things global. But the highest in profile award goes to their phones, Nokia. Yes, that's not a Japanese brand for all you would-be language scholars. I'm not sure where their corporate headquarters are, because I keep seeing large buildings and corporate campuses with their name all over them. Needless to say, they are the number one phone maker in the world.

It is held by some, but unconfirmed, that in a country of just over a five Million people, only 600,000 to 800,000 still have land lines. That's right, only five Million people in Finland, that's how many people speak Finnish, and that's how many people have cellular phones in the country. And believe me, pay phones don't exist. Your cellular is everything here. I suppose this isn't too far off from the way it in the US, or soon will be.