A few weeks ago I had the good fortune and pleasure of being able to visit Helsinki. I was there for the 102nd meeting of TC39, which was co-hosted by Mozilla this time. As someone interested in standards and potentially increasing the amount of standardization work I do, I thought this would be a particularly good meeting to dip my toes into.
Helsinki on kaunis kaupunki.
Helsinki is a beautiful city. Visiting in June, I was blessed with long daylight hours and much less rain than I had expected.
Suomi on iloinen maa
Finland is a happy country... according to the World Happiest Report, apparently the happiest country for the last 6 years. Exploring Helsinki I could totally see it. While it's extremely hard to extrapolate from a city to a whole country, I found Helsinki seemed to feel like a place where life would be comfortable in many ways. What I experienced was a city dense with public transit, filled with apartments and parks, and active recreation routes throughout. You saw Finns taking their children places in cargo bikes, people commuting by bike or public transport, and enjoying the many small shops throughout.
I got the vibe (and this is distinctly a vibes-based piece) that Finland due to its unique language has been invaded just a bit less than other countries by international giants... though I definitely saw a few Burger Kings.
Suomalainen Sauna on todella hyvä
Finnish Sauna is really good. I was really lucky; one of our Finnish Mozillian colleagues took a number of us from TC39 to Lonna, an adorable island a brief ferry ride away from Helsinki's market square. There we enjoyed for a couple of hours a wood fired Finnish sauna. I even managed to swim in the Baltic Sea at Lonna... twice!
Sauna is a huge part of Finnish culture -- it's included on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Experiencing it on Lonna was wonderful, and I'm very glad that was my first experience. Emboldened by Lonna, a couple of days later I tried the sauna in my hotel, and the experience was starkly different. Where Lonna was hot, but felt like a warm embrace... the hotel sauna felt much more like being in an oven. I couldn't take the heat in the hotel sauna at all.
I took a little time and explored Suomenlinna while I was in Helsinki. It is an inhabited set of islands that were fortified into a defensive fortress by the Swedish and Russians. It was a fascinating outing — I gently regret not taking a guided tour of some sort. It was here where I was attacked or harried by so many birds. So many angry hungry birds.
Suomalainen on kaunis kieli
My wife has been learning German casually through Duolingo for a while. I think we both acknowledge that it's not going to teach you a language, but you get to sample the language in small chunks -- and you do pick things up, just not detail or grammar or culture. Nevertheless, the day I booked my flight to Finland I joined her on Duolingo, but for Finnish.
Finnish has a bit of a reputation for being challenging; it's not a relative of many languages (Wikipedia tells me that the three largest Finno-Ugric languages are Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian). I found learning Finnish to be a very mind-opening experience. While there's lots about Finnish that is hard (and I have barely scratched the surface: search for 'istahtaisinkohankaan' on the Wikipedia for Finnish to see the derivation of how that word means "I wonder if I should sit down for a while after all"), there's also lots about it that feels very regular, which as an English speaker is deeply unfamiliar. For example, pronunciation is quite regular, a huge change from English.
I didn't have high hopes for using my very weak Finnish skills in Finland, and I was largely correct there. I never spoke it to anyone. Still, it was neat to be able to decipher the signage; some time just reverse engineering some of the signage based on what I did know.
I told myself when I got back I'd likely move on to something else. I really enjoyed the brain expansion I got from ~70 days of Finnish, and figured that when I got back I'd try something else... I was thinking perhaps learning enough Hangul to sound out a food menu. But I have found myself returning to Finnish. It's still enjoyable to practice and learn. Who knows how long I will continue, of whether I will ever use it... but I am enjoying it now, so why wouldn't I keep at it.
Hyvä Suomi
Bravo Finland. I had a great time visiting, and you've made me want to return. Thanks for the wonderful time -- Apparently compliments are challenging, but truly, Thanks.