4/4/18 Finnish Exchange Lunch

  On April 4th, Poly welcomed 5 Finnish students to campus, and I had the distinct pleasure of getting to know two of them: Viekko and Heke. Viekko and Heke came with me to Biology class, and I got to know them further over lunch. Thanks to the knowledge I'd been able to glean from getting to know Oskari, Poly's very own Finnish exchange student, I already knew a bit about Finnish way-of-life, and I loved asking Viekko and Heke questions about Finland and its culture.
    Throughout lunch Viekko, Heke, Oskari and I talked a bit about the different ways in which our two respective-- and surprisingly different-- countries deal with manners. Together we tried to dissect something that we realized to be an odd, and singularly American, propensity for niceties, formalities, and propriety. Viekko offered up qualms about being perceived as rude or mismannered, and it was interesting to think about Oskari-- kind and genuine but very rarely lyrical-- being seen as anything but just plain nice by those whom misconceive his casual candor, conflating minimalism with incivility. In Finland, candor and minimalism are standard, while in America, polite demeanor is of (peculiarly) high importance. Finland and the U.S. are different, sure, but Americans should hardly feel so self-important at the fact that we so happen to choose to dot our "I's," while the Finns prefer to cross their "t's" instead.
Heke, Viekko, Oskari, and I (and then again Oskari and I later on that week, as we found the conversation really interesting) weighed the pros and cons of excessive propriety, eventually deciding that honesty superseded both "please" and "thank you." It was an incredibly interesting discussion, made even more interesting by the foreign perspectives that Heke, Viekko, and Oskari were able to provide.

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