How to Fail at Being Finnish: Diary #2
The bearded man
Welcome to my ongoing diary of life as a Brit living in Finland. Each week I write about the things that colour my days and the, occasionally weird, ways this country keeps surprising me.
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Wil
#2
FRIDAY
As expected, my Finnish lessons are proving as pleasant as a back alley colonoscopy. The upshot, however, is that the hours of role playing and vocab tests now make my Friday and Saturday nights spent cooking at a small brewery restaurant feel like spa days.
It’s a world away from my Michelin kitchen days, but the people I work with might just make it the most amusing job I’ve ever had.
Take R, for example, an immigrant like me who, chief among his many qualities, enjoys singing Queen songs mid-service very nearly as much as I do (even the deepest of cuts such as Princes of the Universe!)
Unfortunately, R speaks even worse Finnish than I do.
Luckily, I have T, a Finn, on hand to help me road-test the new verb forms and conjugations I’m trying to master. Today’s Friday shift is the first I’ve seen T since I started my lessons and I tell him how hard it is, that I feel like the other students might be at just a slightly higher level than I am.
Even if you haven’t been reading me for very long and are unaware of how needy and high maintenance I am, you can probably guess what kind of response I’m angling for here.
I want him to tell me something to the flavour of:
“Oh don’t be silly, Wil. I’m sure you’re doing great and that everyone feels uncertain of themselves so early in a course like yours and, also, did you know how great your hair is?”
But I’ve been living among Finns long enough to know this won’t happen.
“Did you take a test to get in or something?” he says.
“I even had an interview,” I tell him.
And then, with a typically Finnish broadside filtered of none of its stinging brutality, he says:
“Well, there you go, mate. Perhaps you present as more intelligent than you really are. You know, because you’re English maybe.”
A dagger through my heart.
MONDAY
My morning routine involves walking the dog while my wife takes care of dressing the kids for preschool.
Both jobs are more difficult than they have any business being.
Ever since he has started taking anti-epilepsy pills, my dog’s compulsion to eat any matter with the slightest aroma has become pathological. This offers particular challenges when either our kids are eating some rye bread on the sofa or when we are walking him outside.
My wife is convinced that, on a recent walk in the woods, she turned to find him with a human turd hanging from his mouth. She was repulsed by this, obviously, and on returning home I tried to reassure her how unlikely it is that a local man has taken to shitting in the woods in a corner of Finland as polite as ours.
Surely.
This is why I have something to the tune of what animal poo looks like human poo? in my Google search history as of this week.
Unfortunately the only such animal I could find is a bear and sightings of them in our area remain, unfortunately, rare.
*
With everyone ready for school, I take the kids downstairs from our top floor apartment. For a moment my son, daughter and I are faced in the same direction toward the elevator mirror. One doesn’t notice it while it’s happening of course but, next to those pristine and perfect faces of my children, it is clear that my thirties have aged me about as well as a jar of mayonnaise left out in the sun with the lid off.
And then, something unexpected. I catch my son Sam looking at me and he says:
“I like your beard, daddy. You look handsome.”
I spent so much of my young manhood trying to be attractive. To get dates with women, to impress other men, to be beautiful.
Hearing I’m handsome from a thing as cosmologically perfect as my son, beats the yes of any request for a date I’ve ever had.
TUESDAY
Winter hits here in Finland like someone spilling a glass of wine on your pants, you never see it coming.
When I go to unlock the bike this morning, the kids already buckled up and ready to go, I discover the lock mechanism is entirely jammed in the freezing temperatures.
Google is about as helpful as it was with the bear turd situation: I can either piss on the lock or dowse it in hand sanitiser.
I get the kids out of the cargo bike and we walk instead.
*
An hour later when I need to cycle to my own school the lock will still be frozen shut. In desperation I will take some hand sanitiser from the public bathroom in our building and pump it liberally over the keyhole.
It will unlock in moments.
WEDNESDAY
I have a new conversation partner in class, a Latvian woman in her 60s who I adore within 30 seconds because she is loud and animated and it simply makes me less conscious of how bad my Finnish is.
The form of our lessons generally involves a short explanation from the teacher on a new grammatical intricacy followed by an exercise in which we use said intricacy in conversation with our partner.
We are trying to achieve what is called “B2” level Finnish with this course. And because B2 exercises are physically exhausting to me, I often slip into my basic “A2” Finnish to chat with my partner. I find out she is a cook as well and she shows me various pictures on her phone of the kind of food I fell in love with when I visited Riga with my wife in the months before our son was born.
During one such chat I ask her if she speaks English and she says no and it dawns on me how magical the thing we are doing at this moment really is.
Here I am, a Brit with no knowledge of Latvian, with a Latvian who speaks no English, communicating well enough in this weird third language to make sense of each other. Like a secret code.
One benefit of this (deeply humbling) language learning experience, is the opportunity to appreciate with fresh eyes how magical speech really is. The intricately modulated ejections of wind from a bag in our chest that lets us share ideas and hopes and dreams.
What is more beautiful than that?
THURSDAY
I’ve done 16 hour shifts in fine dining, Michelin Star restaurants with only ten minutes along the way for a break to shovel some lukewarm rice and sinewy lamb trimmings down my throat.
Those shifts are nothing compared to how hard a two hour Finnish class is.
But it’s been 2 weeks now. And what I’m working on is embracing this unpleasantness. Accepting how difficult and frustrating it is. And I think there’s something empowering about this. Now I’m not expecting it to be anything other than painful, I think I’m getting better at actually enjoying it.
When I get home from school my wife tells me about the meeting she had at our daughter’s pre-school today to discuss her development. I’m surprised to learn that the teachers have already started grading her language skills as well.
Turns out my four year old little girl, who spends her days playing with toy cats and dragons made of plastic crystals, has been judged as having B1 level Finnish.
It’s not healthy to be jealous of one’s daughter, is it?
FRIDAY
The long days of Finnish, and nights cooking have made the hours spent with my little ones that bit sweeter these past weeks. After work and school, my wife and I take Sam and Elise out to a new park nearby so they can enjoy it in the snow. On arriving, we share a look of mutual disappointment in ourselves as the tears of our children announce the park isn’t open yet.
We take them to a nearby shop to buy them a treat to make up for it when, as we enter, standing a few steps behind him, I notice Sam’s head turn, focussed on something he can’t seem to draw his gaze from. When I look back to check what it might be, I see he has been staring at an old man. He has wild grey hair, tattered clothes, and a beard of matted bush that reaches down to the top of his chest. He looks like he hasn’t washed in months.
“It’s rude to stare,” I tell Sam.
“It’s just… his beard, daddy.”
“What about it?”
“Makes him look soooo handsome.”
Thanks for reading.
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That picture of a Delft blue sky, Wil. Cold but clear. Amazing, you're so lucky. I loved this essay, reminded me greatly of Tim Dowling, in the best way. I do enjoy a window into another world.
I know Finnish is a difficult language, but if it’s any comfort, it’s not impossible to learn. Just last month, I wrote about a man who became fluent in Finnish in four years. Of course, I don’t know what kind of plans your family has for the future.
How are you coping with the darkness? It’s usually something many people from abroad find challenging.
A Finnish friend of mine lives in the UK, and when she and her British partner talk about possible places to live in the future, the first thing he says is that he couldn’t handle the darkness in Finland.