Why hello, and welcome!
So, a quick introduction: I’ve been living in Finland since January 2010, and for the very most part, it’s been pretty damn cool.
I’m originally from Cape Town, South Africa, which is rather far away from my new home here in Finland.
A not so quick introduction:
You may wonder what on earth I'm doing all the way here. Well, quite simply, I’m married to a Finnish man. And how did we meet? About 5 and a half years ago, online, completely by random chance when I was bored and picked some hotmail account off of an anime fan site, just to have someone to chat to in msn about how cool I thought Naruto was. Lo and behold, I met the love of my life!
Back then, I still thought of Finland as one of those random countries I knew nothing about. I’d never given much thought to Scandinavia. I was too busy obsessing over Japan, wanting to move there to become an English teacher like hundreds of others. Though these days it seems more like millions.
Anyhow, my curiosity about Finland rapidly grew. This bizarre language from a land where people swatted each other with “bushes” (Birch branches) in the sauna, and forests stretched mile upon mile, where it’s considered completely normal for your average-Joe family to own (at least partly) a family cabin on some island somewhere. I almost couldn’t believe the unusual…ness of it all…
Although, come to think of it, any passers by on this blog who don’t know much about South Africa might imagine my home town to be equally unusual, but the place where I’m from, and also my family in general, is all quite Western in culture. No wacky rituals to share, though I do know a bit about a few other cultures in the country that can be very unusual, you’ll find that the average white British-decent South African family in SA is pretty neutral and boring. I’ll probably point out some notably different things between SA and Finland in the future, but this is a blog about living in Finland, not South Africa.
Oooo K. So I’ve lived here for over a year now, and you might imagine, being a metal fan and all, that I’ve been to countless metal festivals and gigs and adventured above the arctic circle and all that awesome stuff. But sadly no, it’s not as easy as you might think. I lived here without any permission to work for about a year… I’d scraped together a small fortune before venturing to the north, so I did alright, but it most certainly was not a luxurious time. Living in a house with your very Finnish future mother-in-law, who hardly speaks English, in a very tiny town in the middle of nowhere, ends up in one doing a hell of a lot of nothing. Other than desperately and hopelessly searching for creative work that would accept a foreigner who can barely speak a word of Finnish. It was a torturous and absolutely wonderful time, all at the same time. I couldn’t bare not being allowed to work. And the more rejections I had, the less motivated I became, and the more the nothingness ensued… I was away from my home and my family, my language, my comfort zone and far away from anyone talkative. My husband is a wonderful man, but he really isn’t the most conversational. And I can be a bit of a jabber-mouth… Though it was hard, I woke up in a cute wooden Finnish house every morning with a forest for a backyard and no neighbours to be seen. It was beautiful and serene, while my mind was in utter chaos.
Well, eventually things moved on, we couldn’t wait any longer for me to find work that would give me permission to live there permanently. I was running out of visa time. So we decided to get married. We’d been in a relationship for 4 years and wanted to get married anyway, so we went ahead with a small court marriage, and me being true to myself, I wore a black dress, to my mother-in-law’s dislike and my own mother’s sigh of relinquishment on the other end of the phone.
We were and still are happy to be married. We celebrated our 1 year anniversary last month and everything is great between us. We also have a beautiful Siberian cat who is a significant part of my family life nowaday’s and we’re soon going to welcome a new little Siberian girl! A great thing about living in the icey north is the availability of these beautiful naturally long-haired cats. They’re huge-little beasts that puff up in winter and look like mythical creatures, while shedding minimally and at the same time not causing any allergies.
Oh, I’ve gone off about my kitties again… This will happen a lot.
Well, my husband and I moved to a small “city” called Uusikaupunki (Translated to “New City” though it was hardly a city) for a short while where my husband worked at a boat petrol station where locals went, as well as the odd rich holiday goers who went to fill up their shiney yachts with piles of cash.
Then we decided we needed to move to a bigger city to up my chances of finding work as an English-speaker, and also hopefully find somewhere that I could learn Finnish. And so we finally came to Turku. My husband, who I will now call by his nickname “Vesku”, was accepted into an art academy to study film here and he’s now about to start his second year. Meanwhile, the past 6 months I spent my time in an internship where I was paid by the government support to train at a freelance studio of sorts, where we did animation for adverts and I learned to use After Effects. I was told several times that I’d be hired there, but in the last moment the company pulled out of the agreement because of financial reasons, without giving me any warning signs that this was likely to happen.
And after all this, I've only had one super beginners course in Finnish, so I’m practically nowhere nearer to having the language advantage than when I started out. And bloody hell I’m telling you, Finnish is a HARD language to learn. I might be forced to attend a Finnish school again, where I was once invited to see, with Highschool-like curfew and filled with immigrants and refugees who were all so completely different to me and often only spoke their own home languages and hung out in little groups of their own culture. Nowhere was there a black-clad english-speaking tomboy-ish person like me, sitting there playing Pokémon Soul Silver on my new DS that I’d saved up for. And did I mention it was like Highschool? Starting at 8 in the fucking morning with an hour bus trip to get there. And man am I one terribly anti-morning person. I’ve suffered too much time being forced awake at 5 every morning in SA because of my car-driving brother’s obsessively early habits.
Well I'm now trying to get my things together and advertise myself for freelance work while trying to get a new internship, this time hopefully at a games studio! I've started a small animation project for an intro to my new show reel, and just haven't found the motivation to finish it... I figured maybe I'll let myself off until we move into our new apartment at the end of the month, with our new kitty cat to accompany both me and my other demanding kitty all day. Hopefully the fresh place will give me new motivation to get things going.
Anyhoo, I guess that’s the just of my life in Finland for now. In future posts I’ll speak more about the interesting things in Finland. Fun stuff that makes it unique, or just things that make it very different from what I’m used to. Also the odd update about my life. And also some pictures!
You can certainly expect a post next week indefinitely. That’s when our new KITTY arrives! Happy days!
Well, bye for now~
P.S. In my background photo on the left is my very good Finnish friend Sonja with the cigarette and I’m the one on the left showing the horns \m/
