Are you nice?

I talked to someone who had moved to Finland a couple of years ago. He knew where Kuopio was (!) when I told him I’m from there. ”People are quite nice there, right?” ”Mmh, well yes…” ”Are you nice?” I told him he needed to decide that after the conversation.

But I started pondering. Is it different to talk to someone from Kuopio than to a Helsinki-born, has-never-lived-outiside-the-ring-road type of person? That is, to anyone brought up in those small towns somewhere out there in the north or east. 

And obviously I thought there was a difference. This was also the answer I got when talking to a friend (who is from one of those towns). Without generalising – that everyone from the capital are as cold as the wind there or  that only incredibly sympathetic and generous people like us can come from small towns -, we thought that the socialisation is just not the same: you grow up differently there in the middle of a forest than you do in a city (that only 7 places in Finland would have counted as, according to an EU definition in 2004).

on the street, paris carnival style.

Every once and a while when I go back to Kuopio I get a chance to observe. Walking across the market square (tori) on a Saturday afternoon, when there’s the more than usual amount of people, the people don’t know what to do. They seem helpless in a crowd: where to go when someone is walking towards you and there’s someone behind you?

Then the lovely people show how to behave in their loving and respectful way. They bump into you and pretend they didn’t notice. They don’t say sorry if they are going to pass you from the 0,02 metre gap that you just aren’t using, and don’t need to be notified of.