Tribal Wives In Rural Finland
Vegemitevix wrote a great post yesterday about the program Tribal Wives, where a woman from suburban UK is taken and dropped into an indigenous tribal society. Vix, an expat from New Zealand now living in a rural Hampshire town, wrote her own tongue in cheek rules for women about moving to her little green part of the world.
It got me thinking, if a woman was transported from her home in suburbia, what rules would she need to know about to fit in here in rural Finland?
Tribal Wives In Rural Finland.
1. Leave your make-up at home. A touch of powder and a swipe of mascara is considered pretty made up here. If you put on foundation, false eye lashes and lipstick people would flock around you in the street staring and pointing at the funny painted lady.
2. Clothes are practical garments for keeping the body warm. If something is less then 20 years old it is practically new.
3. Never throw anything away. Any old clothes, broken furniture, or anything that isn’t actually the sort of garbage that’s going to fester, should be kept, just in case. It’s okay to devote an entire room to this.
4. Lose your inhibitions about others seeing you naked and do not, whatever you do, wear a bathing suit in the sauna. For one, urgh, why would you want to wear clothes to sweat in? Ick. 2. You’ll look like an idiot. 3. You’ll feel like an idiot sitting in your clothes amongst all those naked people.
5. That weird practice you have in the rest of the world about locking your house even when you are inside it, don’t do that. People wont be able to get in. You start locking your door and people are going to think you are up to something weird that you don’t want others to see.
6. Expect people to just wander into your house without knocking and family and friends to turn up for a weeks stay completely unannounced. You must have a constant supply of clean sheets and a ready spare room at all times just in case.
7. Food is important. It is vitally important to have a banquet worth of food available to potential visitors at any time of day. If anybody steps so much as a foot inside your home you must leap on them and assail them with offers of coffee, 5 kinds of cake, homemade biscuits and scones.
8. All visits to someones house must include a hot drink and snack. Leaving without eating and drinking something or refusing the food and drink will make you look like an ungrateful arse. If going for a meal or to stay, you must take a bag of coffee and some biscuits/chocolate for the hostess.
9. Men work, women stay home and look after the children and house. Of course looking after the house and kids also involves looking after the farm and animals, collecting firewood, picking berries and mushrooms, growing and harvesting vegetables, baking a constant supply of food, shovelling snow, entertaining the unexpected guests and not being surprised when people turn up to eat or stay for a week without any prior notice. If a woman must insist on working she must fit all if this around that.
10. Get used to hearing the sounds of your boyfriends/husbands voice on the phone. No, not whilst talking to you, silly, whilst sat next to you talking to someone else. Finnish men have a weird addiction to their mobiles and it seems to be considered normal for them to talk on them all day. I once went on a date with a guy, before I met my fella, who spent 15 minutes sat opposite me in the bar talking on his phone. It may have been longer, I dunno, I left.
So what rules or advice would you give to someone that was suddenly transported into your world?
I’m going to meme-ify (a new word I just made up) this and ask Dara, from Readily A Parent, Very Bored in Catalunya, Gooner Jamie, and Cate from I’ll think of a title later, to tell us what they would advise.
And of course anyone else that wants to join in too.
I'm Heather, an ex expat, now back in blighty and living in Lancashire. Which is just like Lapland... only less snowy and stuff.
I would not last long in Finland, this I know for sure. I would be the funny painted lady who must own a clothes store because she’s always in something new, who is a terrible hostess because she didn’t bake 5 types of cake and must be retarded in some way because she doesn’t get her gear off in the sauna.
Wait til you hear what a Tribal Wife in Adelaide needs to know, BWAHAHAHA.
Challenge accepted, it’s going to be messy though, it’s one of the rules.
Sometimes i think i’m a great big Finland Fail too. sigh.
Very interesting. I think I’d still like to live there, at least for a few months. Do you happen to have an extra bed or two?
Ooh thanks for the tag. I would fail dramatically at being a Finnish Tribal wife, guests? Uninvited? Stay for weeks? Need cake? Gah, I would be running for the hills. I could do the no make up, old clothes thing though.
Omg re the phone thing… do you find that your hubby will walk around the entire house on the phone and then if you are sitting minding your own business watching TV he will then proceed to sit beside you and speak very loudly so you can’t hear the TV for the next 20mins, despite there being other quiet unused rooms in the house?
2, 3 and 7 sell Finland to me big time. 4,5 and 6 put me off in equal measure.
As for rules for my world? Please wipe your feet on the way in and don’t just help yourself to souvenirs on the way out. Careful drivers appreciated.
Oh the naked in the sauna thing – same goes for Germany (and usually sauna is mixed as well, though you do take a towel to cover up a little bit). I have a good friend here in the UK, German like me, who insists it’s unhygienic to wear a bathing costume, but loves to go to the sauna. Oh the stares and ever so polite comments. We were once even asked to leave. I take the integrational approach and won’t be seen dead in a British sauna without a costume on (just thought I’d clarify that
).
I think it’s pretty much the same everywhere, isn’t it? Especially #9.
You know, I just spent a week and a half in Michigan and every time I go there I am shocked at the fact that no one locks their doors, not even when they leave the house to go somewhere. Considering that if you did that around here in Dallas, your home would be completely cleaned out in 5 minutes or less, I felt really weird the first few days, thinking that an armed robbery was imminent. But after I settled in, it was really cool being in a community where everyone was so trusting. I wish everywhere could be like that. But unexpected visitors for weeks at a time? I’m going to have to work up to that one.
Oooh thanks muchly for the mention sweetie! That’s really cheered me up on a cold wet day in Blighty!! As for me I really couldn’t handle visitors for weeks at a time, though there is that aspect in being an Antipodean in England. Simly being a Kiwi or Aussie here means that you can expect great cuzzie Shell or Tom to utilise your home as an ipso facto backpackers. We had my young nephew and his girlfriend staying on our floor for a couple of months in our first year here. Was a little bit crowded.
Couldn’t stand the make cake and feed everyone and the whole buy a gift for the hostess, wtf? What’s wrong with a bottle of wine that you can then both drink? Don’t think I’d last long in Finland somehow..seems to have some of the same vaguely chauvinistic double-rules that we have here in rural England.
My husband does the same thing, but he’s not Finnish. He’s from the mountains of Virginia, but don’t call him a hillbilly!
Fascinating.
It sounds very different from … well, from anywhere I’ve ever lived.
Can you clear up one question for me? I got to know a Finnish PhD student in Scotland. She was there with her husband and 2 small children. She told me that in Finland, men and women both work, and it is assumed they will both have jobs/careers. She said – and I quote – “there’s no such thing as a housewife in Finland”. But from what you say, that’s not how it is where you are. Would it be very different in urban Helsinki? I’m not sure where she was from, but I’m thinking it was the absolute north.
Funnily enough…
Maybe it’s just a man thing?
Yes! All the time.
the make up and old clothes thing is an awesome excuse not to have to bother
Im surprised at you not liking the sauna rule, usually the guys don’t have a problem with it but the girls do.
I can well imagine being asked to leave a UK sauna for being naked! As ridiculous as it sounds. It is unhygienic though, don’t you think, to have to wear lycra when sweating in a sauna? The sauna is all about cleaning yourself, after all.
If you did half of these where I come from you’d either be locked up in hospital. #9 is true for this small area of Finland but not so much for the rest of it, I think. It’s quite a progressive place and housework/cooking/child care seem to be shared chores.
Not locking up all the time is nice, especially when you come from a horrible nasty place like I do, but yeah, the people just wandering in is irritating at times. you do get used to it though
That would drive me nuts having people think they could just come and use my house like a hostel!
Finland is an odd country in many respects. In a lot of places it is very progressive -more urban areas- housework/cooking/childcare is often done by both men and women and i know several people whose husbands are in charge of the cleaning for example. however, out here in my little village things are somewhat different. The description was somewhat tongue in cheek and more true of my mother-in-law’s generation than mine but still, whilst it is no longer mandatory for the woman to stay home and look after everything, it is still expected.
I have always wondered what Finnish holidays are like — because I work at Nokia and know so many Finns as a result. Thanks for an interesting post — enjoyed reading. it.
I’m with Cate P… I so wouldn’t last long in Finland! What a tribal wife needs to know in Scotland could be a good one….
Does being a Scot living in England count as an ‘Ex-Pat’ for the purposes of this ‘Tribal Wives’?
[...] but this one is ok. Because I get to make up the questions and the answers. She started it, and a few other people have done it; and I’ve had a good chuckle! It’s a sort of guide for how [...]
hmm…im finnish and that doesnt sound like finland at all! (except for the sauna bit lol) a lot of women work longer hours than men here and they most certainly dont stay at home to cook and clean. we dont even have tribes in lapland anymore… only reindeer herders but they dont live like that either!
1.finnish people are known for not being uncomfortable with silence and that we are not that social. the only unexpected visitor my family has ever had was our crazy neighbour who came to complain about our dogs barking…
2.we actually do wear make up and we buy new clothes… after all this is finland we are talking about not romania and people actually have money to buy nice things. we also have various clothing brands for example marimekko which has even been seen in sex and the city.
3.finnish education system is one of the best in the whole world. thats why things like nokia, angry birds, xylitol, heart rate monitor and internet filtering have been invented here.
4.finland was the fist country in europe to have a female president so the women here are considered equal to men.
5.kuusamo is very close to a large and very popular ski resort called ruka so the town actually has suprisingly lot of shops etc.
its horrible how meny people think that finland is a small country where people live in iglus and that they survive by hunting polar bears or sum shit…