Read two blogs ago before reading this one

Okay so I decided to break it up into three blogs. I figure I'll get to some other stuff now, there's so much surely I can't write it all. Let's talk some about my impressions so far of Finns. First of all, wow. They have a very interesting and admirable society and culture. Now, I don't really know much about Finnish history or anything like that yet, so I can't say much as far as old Finnish cultural history or anything like that. One thing I can tell though, is that everything I've been told about Finns is basically true thusfar. I mean, it's usually not good to generalize and go by stereotypes, but these generalizations are actually complements or self recognized features of the Finns. The Finns, from what I've personally noticed, are very shy. Not really shy in the way a lot of people think. A lot of times shyness can be mistaken as snobbishness or being stuck up, but certainly not in this case. Some Finns when you speak to them, look at you like they're almost scared of you. Obviously they're not, I've thought to myself that perhaps they just don't feel too comfortable speaking English. Then I saw interactions between two Finns that didn't know each other and they both seemed scared of each other too hahah. I mean I guess that's better than America in some respects, a lot of places you go people look at you like you're an asshole or perhaps their competition.

You know after you get Finns talking though, they're actually quite confident, all intelligent, and extremely well spoken. And when I mean extremely well spoken, I mean in English they're well spoken. It's almost embarrassing how well they speak English haha. Many of them i would guess were from Canada or from England because their accent sounds more like the accents of the people who probably taught them English rather than a Finnish English accent.  I have run into a few people that cannot speak English, but they're certainly in the minority. The country is practically trilingual, as the they already have two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. This is all not to mention that most of them are proficient in or at least speak some of the other major European languages. Strange, it seems like every Finn I run into that can't speak English, the same thing happens every time. I try to speak English, they do this motion with their arms as if saying "safe!" at a baseball game, exclaim "No English!" and run and get someone who knows English I can speak to.

The Finnish language, uhh Finnish, seems interesting but also seems so incredibly complicated I just can't imagine how they go about their daily lives. The other day at orientation, we were shown a Finnish word that is 61 letters long. Now just to get an idea, that is a word of the following length:

Adfadfaineihchnwpowenceoiqpoioernonceioshteanzmuenbewokmcewuiw

Yeah....yeah. So anyways they also have a bunch of these things called "cases" which they use instead of really common words such as to or from or at. Instead of saying any of those types of words, they just add a new ending to the main word and that's a case. Apparently there are 50 cases. That's just ridiculous to me. No wonder they can learn so many languages, everything else is a piece of cake to them! Can't be nearly as hard as their mother tongue so why not? 

A few more interesting notes about their language, it's monotone. No rising tone or anything when they ask a question like us. They don't have a future tense. Strange. Also, and this is pretty cool I think, no gender. We are all a bunch of its running around everywhere. No she, no he. This level of equality shows in their politics, as they have a female president and a large proportion of government is also females. The Finnish female is apparently also very career driven. Perhaps too much so with both sexes, as they can't seem to get people to have as many babies as they would like. Opposite problem to much of the world. 

The education system is consistently ranked among the best in the world, and I haven't had many classes yet, but I can certainly see how it's very very different from other systems I've heard of. The semester here is way different from the semester in America. A semester in Finland is more like a series of minimesters and summer semesters. I'm taking 2 classes right now. One is on Monday and Wednesday, and lasts till the second week of February. On Monday it's two hours of class and four on Wednesday. The other one I'm taking right now is Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday, and lasts one week. That's right, it ends this Friday. It's 4 hours of class a day. Here, classes last anywhere from 1-9ish weeks. You have finals throughout the semester. If that wasn't crazy enough, you can take the final exams more than once and take the better grade. If you fail a class, you can take it over as many times as you want. When you fail completely, it doesn't show on your record. If you make a bad grade, you can retake the course and the better grade will go on your record. 

So absurd, and pretty different, and pretty awesome. Surely many countries, including at least to some extent the US, could really take a page out of Finland's book. Alright I'm gonna leave you with that. I'll write more about my specific events in Finland pretty soon. 

Peace!