Up until very recently I was very worried about finding some work for the summer. Finally, I got confirmation that I did get the job i applied for, so now I'm very happy about how things turned out.
Only inconvenience is that the job is in Kemiö, which is a little over 150km from where I live now, so I have to move there with my spouse and our three cats and the green iguana... It could take some getting used to, since I've almost always lived in a larger town, most recently in Tampere and Helsinki, and Kemiö is about as rural as you can get. (Well, there is a town, but it's a very small town) A large part of the inhabitants of the place are farmers and don't even live in the town.. and as an added bonus, hardly anyone there speaks Finnish. Almost all daily business and conversation is done in Swedish, and a very slurred Swedish at that. These people seem to speak in fast bursts, and their pronounciation is so garbled that it's very hard to understand.
I've never had any difficulty conversing with Swedish people, and I even like the language, but Swedish-speaking Finns are hard to understand. Near Helsinki and other cities, they speak grammatically Swedish, but with almost half of the words Finnish, and everything pronounced as Finnish. The result is a hideous rape of both languages. On the coastline, where Kemiö is, people speak "cleaner" Swedish, but it's still very hard to make out the slurred words. The nearer you get to Sweden, the easier it is to understand the language.
It's also often the attitude of the people, that they would not voluntarily speak Finnish, if they can avoid it. It's worst in semi-autonomous Åland (Ahvenanmaa in Finnish), where you get scornful looks just for trying to purchase something in a store and speak Finnish. It's a bit similar to French people and English language.. Almost everybody there can speak English, but they just won't. If some English-speaking tourists try to talk with them, they just speak back in French, shrugging and waving their hands, pretending not to understand. But, if a tourist even tries to speak a little bit of French, they are much more likely to converse in English. The same goes for Åland, too, but they at least are a part of Finland, so (in my opinion) they shouldn't scorn the Finnish language. I guess they've always wanted more to be a part of Sweden than Finland, anyway.
*sigh* Well, these are the joys of living in a bilingual country. I shouldn't complain, anyway... The job seems nice, it's a gunsmithing job, fairly paid and Kemiö seems like a nice, quiet place to live in. So, I think everything is OK.
Unknown "Horny" Tired
- 16 years, 7 months, 19 days ago
