Finnische Symbole

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Zum 90. Unabhängigkeitstag wurden 9 Ausländer befragt, welche Symbole sie wirklich mit "Finnisch" verbinden:
- Lt. Malcolm Hicks, vom Beruf Übersetzer, sind es Linnanjuhlat. Etwas "komisch", dass jede Celebrity bekannt ist und man schaut stundenlang dem Händeschütteln zu. Finnen nehmen sich sehr zu Herzen, was andere über sie denken (an dem Beispiel des Times Artikel über Jokela).
- Lt. Eva Persson, einer Fotografin aus Schweden, Kalakukko, und seine recht seltsame Kombination von Fisch, Schweinespeck und Brot und die Tendenz zum Minimalismus.
- Lt. Projektassistentin Lea Remes aus den Philipinnen ist es Pipo, die Pudelmütze.
- Lt. Kitari Mayele aus dem Kulturzentrum Caisa ist es Nokia Mobiltelefon und vor allem weil Finnen im Flugzeug ihre Telefone fieberhaft nach der Landung kollektiv einschalten und von überall her kommt die Begrüssungsmusik. ( )
- Für die russische Journalistin Eilina Gusatinsky ist es der Sommer und die Beeren
- Für Ana Eskola aus Venezuela sind es Haferflocken zum Frühstück
- Projektleiter Ghaffoor Hejazi-Hashemi aus Iran sagt, es ist Sauna und Nordic Walking.
- Die Deutsche, Anja Sorasalo verbindet Finnland mit Bergen von Schuhen im Flur
- Georg Simojoki aus Ostdeutschland zählt auf: Pilzmesser (mit dem Bürstchen an dem anderen Ende), Eisangeln und Handbidet. Er erwähnt auch noch Mittelspurfahrer auf 3 spurigen Autobahnen.

Kolumne

Life in blue and white
Nine foreigners and naturalised Finns offer their symbols for Finnishness
By Ritva Liisa Snellman

The President’s Independence Day Reception

"Independence Day is a festive moment in the Finnish annual round, but it is also a rather comical day”, says translator Malcolm Hicks. “Millions of people sitting on the sofa and watching the presidential couple shaking hands with a long line of party guests.”
And they will be doing that in the Hicks household in Mikkeli, too. Candles burning in the windows, maybe a quick sortie outside to see how other peoples’ candles look, and then back indoors to switch on and watch the good and great celebrating the day.
“In a small country like this, there aren’t that many people, and everyone knows someone who has been invited. That one degree of separation tells you something about the human scale of the place.”
Hicks is not exactly a “new” Finn: he has lived here for forty years or so, but he still also looks at Finnishness through British eyes.

Finns have a tendency to be a little over-conscious of what others say and think about them. It manifests itself in any major event that crosses the news threshold, most recently in the case of the Jokela school shootings. In the days that followed, what the correspondent of The Times had written about the incident was very prominently displayed and discussed.
This is understandable, and not necessarily such a bad thing. Finland is a young country, and it can do nothing about its geographical location. The population is small, and being squeezed in between Sweden and Russia is not easy, Hicks argues.

Kalakukko

In the view of photographer Eva Persson, the traditional Savo dish known as kalakukko is an ideal symbol of Finnishness, since to foreign eyes it represents total craziness. The idea of combining vendace or perch, fatty pork, and rye bread in a crusty pasty-style package where convenience wins out heavily over aesthetics - it could only be Finnish.
“It’s a very practical.packed-lunch food”, says Persson.
The kalakukko could not exist in Sweden, for Persson believes that the Swedes are always looking for something new and aspiring to be better than yesterday.
Finns by contrast are satisfied with their lives as they are, and they have no sense of shame about their humble origins in the past. Hence the kalakukko has survived and thrived.

Persson has lived in Helsinki for 12 years, and a week ago she completed her naturalisation process and became a Finn. She will be having friends over to celebrate on Independence Day.
No, kalakukko will not be served, but Persson will attempt to sing V. A. Koskenniemi’s peculiarly maudlin Lippulaulu (an anthem to the Finnish flag, written in 1930 and set to music by Yrjö Kilpinen) to the gathered throng.
“It’s such a depressing song”, she sighs. “Things go from bad to worse and even worse in the lyrics.”

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Pipo

Project assistant Lea Remes still shudders at the memory of how horrified she was on arriving here from the Philippines eight years ago.
Omega to be seen anywhere, and it was dark and cold. Fortunately her mother-in-law quickly taught her how to dress for the climate.
But back then Remes had no time for that fundamental item of Finnish winter headgear, the knitted cap or tuque, often accompanied by a pompom. She is a hat-person, you see.
“The pipo is about as fundamentally Finnish as you can get”, says Remes. “I’ve got dozens of the things, but I still never ever use them in town.”
On Independence Day Remes and her husband always go to the in-laws to eat. First they celebrate mother-in-law’s birthday, then they settle down like everyone else to watch the Palace Reception on the TV.

Nokia handset

In the Mayele family, too, they watch the handshaking rituals on the small screen.
“Finland is my country, and the Independence Day Reception is a part of me”, says Kitari Mayele, a producer at Caisa, the city of Helsinki’s International Cultural Centre. “I started watching them when I was 27 or so. As a youngster I was of course not interested in that sort of thing.”

Mayele has lived in Finland all of sixteen years and feels that he is Finnish.
For this reason alone, he finds it astonishing that he is still forever being asked - practically every day - why he is here.
Since Mayele has no great wish to pour out his life-story in the Metro or on the bus from one decade to the next, he generally answers briefly that he lives here because he loves this country.
“In Congolese culture it would be the height of impoliteness to go asking a foreigner what he’s doing here”, says Mayele. “The Finns are both inquisitive and careful. They always want to know with whom they are talking. After that, they can be generous and big-hearted.”

If Finnishness has to be distilled down into one object, in Mayele’s view a Nokia mobile phone serves best.
When a holiday flight from Helsinki lands at its destination, you can hear the same start-up tone pinging out from between every row of seats, as the Finns feverishly switch on their phones.

Summer and berries

For Eilina Gusatinsky, editor-in-chief of the Russian-language monthly Spektr, Finnishness always means summer, warmth, berries for the picking, Grandmother, and her cousins.
As a child she travelled every summer from the Soviet Union to her grandmother’s place on Lake Saimaa.

In 1990, Gusatinsky settled permanently in Finland. That also marked the beginnings of an Independence Day tradition: meeting up at her mother’s place, doing some baking in readiness for Christmas, and finally watching the President and Co. on the television.
“It’s always a day redolent with good scents and feelings, and this year we are particularly pleased since the chairman of FARO [the Union of the Associations of Russian-Speakers in Finland] has been invited to the party.”

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Ice fishing, and the bidet shower (at last!)

Georg Simojoki, a chef from Porvoo, is in no doubt about his list. He reels off a string of items and phenomena that are all linked to water, tranquility, cleanliness, and infinite practicality of purpose.
“For a start, you’ve got the mushroom-picker’s knife, with a brush for cleaning on the end of the handle. You don’t find them anywhere else. The Finns like to save time and they are ingenious that way. But as for actually marketing and selling stuff, forget it.”

Another Finnish symbol is ice-fishing. Simojoki enjoys angling himself, but the way he sees it, those who sit around a hole in the ice are not driven there by the thrill of the hunt so much as by a longing for peace and quiet.
Ice-fishing is a cheap pastime and a clever way of getting a moment to oneself.
And you don’t even have to travel far.

Yet another stand-out Finnish invention is the bidet hand-shower, that staple of the bathroom so often mentioned by foreigners in Finland. Simojoki has not found its like anywhere else, even though he has plied his trade as a chef all over the world.
There is one thing about Finnish behaviour he has never come to terms with. If there are three lanes on a motorway, Finns always seem to drive in the middle lane.

Simojoki was born in East Germany. It doesn’t exist any longer. His homeland is Germany now.
“But then again, I’ve become so Finnish in the past ten years that of course I’ll be watching the Independence Day Ball on TV, and I’ll be yelling out as usual: ‘I don’t believe it - will-you-look-at-that-dress-she's-wearing!’”

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Life+i ... 5232337012

Und, was sind eure Symbole zum 90. Nationalfeiertag? ?(

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Oatmeal porridge

In her birthplace of Venezuela, breakfast for Montessori teacher Ana Eskola was always a couple of pieces of toast washed down with a cup of coffee.
For the past 26 years, spent up north in Oulu, she has started her day with porridge oats.
To begin with she wasn’t quite sure she liked the taste, but now Eskola never goes to work without a bowl of the stuff inside her.

Oatmeal porridge is just as good a symbol for Finnishness as the more predictable “rye bread”. Sensible and down-to-earth - that’s what life in Finland is all about, at least if you compare it with the current goings-on in Venezuela.
“On Independence Day we eat well and then put two blue-and-white candles up in the window“, says Eskola.
“In the evening we look at old photographs or just loaf about. Sometimes I have gone visiting to watch the party on the TV. We don’t have a television. Our old set broke 18 years ago, and we decided we could manage without.”

Sauna and Nordic walking

As a little boy in his native Iran, project manager Ghaffoor Hejazi-Hashemi used to accompany his mother to spas and public baths, but it was not until he came to Finland that he encountered sauna and adult nudity.
To begin with it was a strange experience, but 27 years spent in Finland have made Hejazi-Hashemi into a firm saunophile.
“People go to sauna in other countries, but it is only the Finns who will build a sauna wherever they happen to be. They have them everywhere, even in places like Saudi Arabia - anywhere where Finns are working.”

“Finns are a living example of cleanliness, outside and in. When you are in the sauna, you can zero all the mind’s dials; just hit the internal reset button and go back for a moment to some kind of primal state.”
And the Finns’ take on physical exercise is no less passionate. Hejazi-Hashemi sees the two things having much in common. Both result in a good feeling.
“Me too, I get a strange sensation when I’m not moving enough. I do an hour’s Nordic walking first thing, and only then go off to work.”

This year Hejazi-Hasemi will not be travelling on business over Independence Day, so the evening’s entertainment at home in Vantaa has already been mapped out.
“We’ll be watching the Reception at the Palace. It makes us laugh and it irritates us in roughly equal measure, but it’s something you just have to watch.”

The mountain of shoes in the hall

German-born Anja Sorasalo cannot imagine anything more totally Finnish than a hallway filled with outdoor shoes.
When she first arrived here, the constant padding about indoors in one’s socks or stockinged feet did seem a bit weird, but Sorasalo got with the local programme years ago.
Nowadays as soon as she gets through the door of her home in Porvoo she kicks the shoes off her feet and into a corner and then navigates her way through a dozen more pairs and into the living room.

Sorasalo figures that the whole socks-inside thing is associated with an informal lifestyle and with Finnish attitudes towards cleanliness. Omega wants mud on the floors, and carpets and rugs are protected from getting dirty.
“The Finns are amazingly picky about their mats. They are forever cleaning them and changing them. I think it’s wonderful when we change the curtains and the mats for Christmas.”

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[Sapmi]

Überschneidet sich ja ein bisschen mit "So typisch finnisch" ;)

Ok, Symbol:

Jokamiehen-(ja -naisen- :] )-oikeus

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Etwas schon.

Hm, was sag ich denn? Ich sag spontan "lässiger Kleidungsstil (auch) im Beruf". Ein sehr weiter Begriff.