A Turkish guy in Finland

Here is the article i've written for the lecture " Finnish Culture and Language " which we had here at HAMK - University of Applied Sciences. It's not a very detailed and deep look at Finnish people and Finland, but i hope it gives you an idea about here.

The first thing you can realize in Finland is the silence.. The silence of the people, streets,traffic and even the pets here are silent.. But it doesn't last forever, the silence replaces itself with the happiness and screams with the first drop of alcohol.

When Finnish people are drunk, now it's the time to have fun ! They suddenly, turn into a very friendly and noise making people. It's not something, i'm complaining about, actually it's something i'm used to live like.. Because we, Turkish people, like to make noise, have fun and chat a lot..

After solving this silence problem by talking too much, now i can come to some important similarities between us and them. We also take off our shoes when we enter a house ! But we don't take off our underpants, when we are in sauna :) So, sometimes it's difficult what to take off when you enter some places :) I don't want to take off my underpants, instead of my shoes when i visit some friends, hehe.. Apart from joking, i find Finnish houses, really well-designed and at good quality. They like to use small decorations all around the flat, and it doesn't matter how big your house is.

One thing, i have to mention is the quality of the jobs they do. The excellence of the workmanship can be realized almost everywhere, the windows of the flats, the cleanness of the buses, well-cared streets, well-designed gardens, everywhere shows that there are rules in this country and every citizen obeys them.

I'd like to finish my article by a funny story of me and my mates:

It was the first day in Forssa and we were looking around. It was so cold that, our eyebrows were even frozen. Then we realized the automated traffic lights, which manages the traffic. We don't have that kind of traffic lights in Turkey. So it was amazing to see how it automatically lights green, when the road is empty so that you don't wait when there are no other cars. Then as computer engineers, we wanted to research the algorithm of this system. How does it recognize the cars and decide about the situation of the roaD ? So, as 4 Turkish guys in Finland, we pretented to be a car, 2 people in the back and 2 people in front and made sound like a car :) One of us was the horn and the other was sounding like the engine, ehe. But we couldn't cheat the traffic light, because the road was empty but it didn't light green for us. All in all, ofcourse we didn't believe that we were going to cheat it, because it was a Finnish-made traffic light. We had fun that day, as the other 5 months we spent here..

To sum up, i can say, there are strange things about Finnish people which are beyond the subject of this article but all in all i'm really happy to know them and live in Finland.

PS: The image on the right is from the yahoo group which i and my mates moderate, and i'm aware of the fact that the word Finish should be Finnish. But again i'm too lazy to edit it :D Sorry..