Finnish weird stuff

After 7 months in Finland, I discovered and tried few “funny-weird” things that I would like to share…

There is this pea soup, that you can find everywhere in Finland on Thursdays for lunch, served with pork and mustard and pancakes for dessert. After a lot of questioning to Finnish people, without any proper answer except : probably from religion, probably from the army… I decided to Google it by myself… and I couldn’t really believe what I found, so I kept looking a bit everywhere, and it looks like it is the proper idea of this pea soup :

“The tradition of eating pea soup and pancakes on Thursdays is said to originate in the pre-Reformation era, as preparation for fasting on Friday.”

That is definitely funny / strange… but at least it is honest !!!

——-

The biggest funny weird thing is the shower in the toilets…

Finnish toilets have all a mini-shower. The question is : how to use it ? and why? We talked a lot, we international friends, with Finnish ones as well, tried to find out… So we got that it is to clean your “private parts”, that it doesn’t use toilet paper, but few questions came out :

– how do you dry yourself ? jumping up and down ? being patient ? or you use the toilet paper, so there is no “saving”of paper…

– how do you do to make sure you don’t flood your bathroom ?

– why is there this mini-showers EVERY WHERE ? at home, restaurant, public toilets, in the airport… we thought it would be alright in an airport to have a shower with it when you travel a lot… but, it is cold water, and I would get all the toilet wet and my stuff as well ! I don’t think it is the purpose…

– why is it in all new buildings as well ? we can think it is a bit of an old thing that we don’t use anymore… but even in a new building you find them !!

It is probably to clean the floor : in the bathroom, you have a “hole” in the floor, to evacuate the water, so it is possible… but, in this case, you also have your proper shower that you can use for that ! And if you only have the toilet, there is not all the time this water evacuation possible…

In the last conversation we had, there was probably few topics at the same time, which ended up to a big mix, but at least we found out THE Finnish secret !!
We talked about some useless parts of our bodies… like the left leg while driving an automatic car, our arms while sleeping… so we decided we could just remove them sometimes (of course !).

Of course, when you leave your arms on the kitchen table in the evening, you need to think about taking your arms back before going to the toilets when you get up in the morning ! Otherwise, that is how you should use the mini-shower in the toilet : You place it on the floor in the evening, you can remove your arms and go to bed, and when you get up and forget your arms, you can use the mini-shower only with your feet, the water stream would go exactly where it is suppose to go !! Ok, we still didn’t really figure out how to avoid the flooding and how to dry afterwards, but it is a start !!

Maybe we could also try to analyse the cleaning of feet, or babies with this shower !

Specially thanks to Nina, Allison, Anna, Katarina, Janine, Elina, Christina who participate actively to find out this secret !

——-

To have a special idea of a typical Finnish day, you can also see here : Finn day.

The “RELAX” one sounds pretty true… drinking beer in swimmers in the snow…

——-

Talking Finnish :

The first day in Finland you learn how to say “hello”, “thank you”, “good bye”…

The second day gets more complicated : “sorry” (because you already bumped into someone else in the supermarket) and “cheers” because you try the Finnish schnaps Salmiakki

——–

That is a great game, and the first time I played I won (and the second time as well) ! It is about throwing a wooden stick to get others with numbers falling down, and getting points. And while playing, the others explain you the rules… like if you missed 3 times in a row, you loose the game 🙁 and if the stick you throw touch the ground before hitting an other one, you got 0 points. And in case you are over the number of points you have to make (50), you get back to 25 points… 🙁

But it is funny, and I think you can play in winter as well because the wooden pieces are big enough to see them in the snow… and anyway it would be stupid to have a game that you can only play only 2 months per year ! (Summer…) 😀

———

That’s my very special Finnish things…

Now it is time to go back to France and getting ready for new adventures !!