I have been visiting this land of the freeze and
home of the grey since June 14,1999, and I now begin to understand what a mid-summer
night's dream is about. In this far way land of Finnland where they have only about
3 to 4 millions people living in a racially uniform nation excpet for some hard feelings
against the Swedes and the Russians, the Finns are essentially rather reserved and
peaceful people. They are not vikings in national origin, and their language is very
different from all the other Scandinavian languages. The Finns came from the Ural
Mountains in central Asia and have the same origin, so I was led to believe, as the Turks
and the Hungarians.
The Baltic states, Estonia, Lavia and Lithuania, are their cousins. Their languages are
similar and they sort of look alike.
Each year, They have something like 2 to 3 months of warm weather, and they treasure them
in a most protective manner. Their summer is not always warm, I was here some 15 years ago
in the summer , and it was 5 degree. I had to leave for Greece immediately to keep warm.
This year it has been 26-28 degree in June , boy, it is warmer than in San Diego. Last
year was hardly as warm as this. June 24-25 is their mid-summer festival, and it is a
bigger holiday than the Thanksgiving in North American and the Lunar new year in Asia.
They have gone out of their way to enjoy the mid-summer. Granted June 24 is not the
longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, but the days are still pretty long.
The sun sets at about 11:40 PM and it comes up at about 4 AM in Helsinki, let alone the
Lappland.
The month of July is their holiday season, no one really works at their jobs, and it
pretty much true for the entire Scandinavia. During the weekend of June 24, they have
their mid-summer night's dreams, and anything can happen in dreams, I would venture to
say. This visitor's dream came true, his experiment worked in the most possible exciting
way.
The Finns are hardy people. They had been under Swedish rules for about 800 yeras, most of
the Finns speak Swedish, and their street signs still have Swedish words on top of the
Finish signs, just like in HK. Of course, England only ruled HK for 150 years. Finns
consider Swedish secondary schools in Finnland superior, as some of us consider English
schools to be superior. Of course, they have their Pui-Chings no doubt.
In 1720 , Peter the Great made St. Petersburg the capital of Russia and started to invade
towards the western front. The Swede lost to the Russians and the Finns had been Russian
rules since about 1750 until the end of ww I, when they became independent until the
winter of 1939. They fought the Russians again along a 800 miles long border and held the
Russians for 100 days ( longer than the Nato bombing of the Balkans). They lost again. It
was the famous winter war of Finnland. They gave 1/3 of their country to the Russian and
finnally joined the Germans to fight Stalin, and lost<BR>
again.
The Finns have done pretty well since these days, just look at Nokia. they have 40% of the
world's market in cell phones. One thing to note about Nokia, they do not have Fab lines ,
they are only a design house and a great marketing organization. Here they beat Ericsson (
a Swedish cell phone company hands down , and the Russian are not into this game at all,
they are still trying to take over the airport at Kosovos).
I have also visited Tallinn (the capitial of Estonia, across the Strait of Finnland to the
south) on this trip. A city still trying to recover from the Soviet rules, but in apparent
much better shape than the present day St. Petersburg. I hope this breif "Car "
report give an general impression of what that part of the world is like.
Before I forget, the Finnish Chocolate "Fazer" and their ice cream are soemthing
to look for next time you are there.
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