25 Surprising Things Finns Do Differently

Every country has its quirks. Finland just has more of them and they tend to be of a particular kind. After more than two decades of watching foreigners arrive in Helsinki and slowly recalibrate, I have come to believe that the country reveals itself in a fixed sequence, first the sauna, then the silence, then the rye bread and eventually the realisation that nobody is being unfriendly, they are simply being Finnish. Below are twenty-five of the things that catch outsiders most off guard.

Most of these come down to the same handful of qualities: honesty, practicality, self-reliance and a deep comfort with silence. For the character behind these habits, see the quirkiest traits of Finnish people.

The first of those qualities a visitor tends to misread is the face itself, which rests at a calm, unbothered neutral that outsiders too often take for displeasure.

1. Leave babies outside to sleep in winter

Walk through any Finnish town in January and you will find rows of prams parked outside cafés, restaurants and homes, each one containing a small, peacefully sleeping baby and a respectable amount of frost on the blanket. Finnish parents have been doing this for at least a century, and they are entirely relaxed about it. Research from the University of Oulu has found that babies napping outdoors in sub-zero air sleep substantially longer than those napping indoors, and Nordic paediatricians continue to recommend the practice down to about minus ten degrees. The cold air, the thinking goes, calms the nervous system, builds early immune resilience and keeps colds at bay. The fact that it also gives the parent a long, blissfully quiet coffee is, naturally, beside the point.

2. Have a sauna in the house

Finland has roughly 3.3 million saunas for a population of 5.5 million, which works out at one sauna for every 1.7 people, give or take. They are in homes, offices, ski lifts, fast-food restaurants, the parliament building and the Finnish embassy in Washington. Friday is the traditional sauna day in most households, although nobody enforces this, and a weekly löyly is considered as standard a part of life as brushing your teeth. UNESCO formally added Finnish sauna culture to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2020, which is the international way of confirming what every Finn already knows.

3. Go ice swimming

After the heat of the sauna, many Finns walk straight outside, cut a hole in a frozen lake and lower themselves in. The water sits at around plus one degree, the air on a February evening can sit at minus twenty, and the contrast between the two is the entire point. The Finnish Swimming Federation estimates around 150,000 active ice-swimmers in the country, and the practice has its own national association, its own competitions and a steadily growing global following. Cold-water immersion has been shown to trigger a measurable release of dopamine and noradrenaline, sharpen circulation and produce an endorphin response that regular ice-swimmers describe as bordering on euphoric. Foreigners trying it for the first time tend to come up gasping, swearing and immediately asking when they can do it again.

4. Walk barefoot in the forest

Walk into a Finnish forest in summer and you will, sooner or later, see someone carrying their shoes. Walking barefoot across moss, pine needles and forest soil is a quietly common Finnish habit, practised for the same reasons people elsewhere pay for grounding mats or float tanks, except that nobody in Finland is going to call it a practice. The Finnish forest floor is genuinely soft, padded with centuries of accumulated lichen, moss and decomposed needles, and it is gentler on the feet than most pavements. The Japanese coined the term shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, to describe what Finns have been doing without naming it for several centuries.

5. Forage for berries and mushrooms wherever they like

Finnish law grants anyone in the country the right to walk, ski, cycle, swim, fish with a rod and line, pitch a tent for one night and pick wild berries, mushrooms and flowers across almost any land, regardless of who owns the soil underneath. This is jokamiehenoikeus, literally everyman's right, and it is one of the oldest and most stubbornly defended ideas in Finnish life. You cannot damage trees, light a fire without consent or enter someone's garden, but otherwise the state assumes that you will behave like an adult, and the entire framework is built outwards from there.

Come late summer, the country quietly empties into the forest. The pursuit is called marjastus, berry-picking, and the prized wild crops are mustikka (the bilberry), puolukka (the lingonberry) and lakka (the cloudberry), the last of which grows only in remote northern bogs and is worth roughly its weight in gold. Finns who know a good lakka patch are notoriously secretive about its location and a productive patch is the kind of inheritance a Finnish family takes more seriously than property.

6. Drink enormous amounts of coffee

Finland leads the world in coffee consumption per capita, drinking around twelve kilograms of coffee per person per year, which is about twice what the average Italian drinks and four times what the average American manages. This is not artisan coffee culture. It is functional, day-long, filter-coffee culture. The Finnish coffee break, kahvitauko, is written into the country's collective labour agreements as a protected fifteen-minute right twice a day. Offering someone coffee is a gesture of inclusion. Declining it without a good reason reads as faintly antisocial, and criticising the strength of someone's filter coffee in their own kitchen is, in some Finnish circles, grounds for a quiet but lasting cooling of relations.

7. Eat rye bread with everything

Finnish rye bread, dark, dense, faintly sour, and built to outlast nearly everything in the kitchen, is more a structural element of the Finnish diet than a side dish. Finns are the highest per-capita consumers of rye in the European Union, and in a 2017 national vote held for Finland's centenary, ruisleipä was crowned the official national food, beating Karelian pies and salmon into second and third place. A loaf of rye will keep for weeks at room temperature, longer still in the fridge, and is one of the few foods that travels well across the polar circle without complaining. Finnish students living abroad routinely smuggle it through customs in their luggage and Finnish embassies receive it as gifts.

8. Drink significant amounts of milk

Finland is one of the highest per-capita milk consumers on the planet, drinking around 120 litres per person per year. Adults drink milk with meals, including hot meals, and Finnish buffet restaurants typically install milk dispensers alongside the water. School lunches are free, hot, and always include milk by law. The habit is not nostalgic or childlike. It simply never stopped, partly because the country has a strong dairy industry, and partly because Finnish people are unusually well adapted to lactose, with one of the lowest rates of lactose intolerance in the world.

9. Grill makkara at the first hint of sun

The moment the outdoor temperature edges above freezing, Finns appear in parks, on terraces and beside lakes with grills, beer and a suspicious quantity of makkara. This is a thick, mild Finnish grilling sausage that exists primarily to be cooked over an open fire and eaten with mustard, and it is less a food than a national declaration that summer has officially been allowed to begin. The country consumes around twenty kilograms of sausage per person per year, much of it grilled in temperatures other nations would still call winter. Makkara is the only known food capable of producing a queue at a petrol station forecourt at minus three degrees.

10. Eat liquorice that surprises the world

Salmiakki is salty liquorice flavoured with ammonium chloride, and it is the single food most likely to separate Finns from the rest of humanity. The taste is intensely savoury, deeply bitter, and nothing like the sweet liquorice familiar to most other Europeans. Finns adore it without reservation. It appears in sweets, ice cream, chocolate, liqueurs and vodka, and Finland exports thousands of tonnes of it every year. Offering salmiakki to a foreign visitor and watching the reaction has become a quiet national pastime, and Finns understand that not everyone will get it. They do not consider this their problem.

11. Take off shoes at the door

Shoes come off at the entrance of every Finnish home without negotiation, without explanation, and without exception. Guests who hesitate are gently corrected, usually by the host's eyes alone. Partly it is practical, because Finnish weather drags slush, grit and sand indoors for most of the year. Partly it is the Finnish view that an outdoor shoe on an indoor floor is, on a basic level, an act of small-scale vandalism. The cumulative result is the cleanest set of floors in Europe and a national entryway full of carefully lined-up boots.

12. Hold World Championships in genuinely absurd things

Somewhere along the way, Finns decided that if you are going to host a World Championship, you might as well host one for something nobody else has had the imagination to attempt. The Wife-Carrying World Championships have been held in Sonkajärvi every July since 1992, with the winning husband receiving his wife's weight in beer. The Air Guitar World Championships have run in Oulu every August since 1996. The Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships take place in Savonlinna, the Swamp Football World Cup is held in Hyrynsalmi, and on a busy year you can also fit in the boot throwing nationals and the World Sauna Sitting Championships, although the last of those was eventually discontinued for reasons that should not require explaining. None of this is ironic. Finns turn up, register, compete and broadcast the results on national television, because the country has a deep and slightly underestimated love of taking ridiculous things entirely seriously.

13. Address everyone by first name

Finland is radically non-hierarchical in personal address. First names are used with strangers, with bosses, with doctors, with the prime minister and with most government officials. Honorifics and titles are largely ignored. The formal te, the polite plural pronoun for you, still exists in Finnish but has fallen so far out of everyday use that hearing it can now feel slightly archaic. Even the President of Finland is comfortable being addressed by first name. None of this is disrespect. It is the Finnish default, and the underlying assumption is that adults speaking to other adults do not need elaborate verbal scaffolding to do so politely.

14. Pay for almost everything by phone

Finland is close to cashless and treats physical money as a mild inconvenience. Coffee, bus tickets, market strawberries, parking meters and the Sunday church collection are all handled by card or phone without anyone blinking. Card payments make up well over 90 percent of point-of-sale transactions, and the few remaining cash users tend to be elderly, foreign or both. Visitors who arrive with a wallet full of euros often leave with the same euros, slightly puzzled, and the small Finnish kiosk that still insists on cash is, by this point, almost an attraction in its own right.

15. Return their bottles and cans for the deposit

Almost every bottle and can sold in Finland carries a small deposit called pantti, which you reclaim by feeding the empties into a reverse-vending machine at the supermarket. The system has been in place since the 1950s, and Finland now achieves a return rate of around 95 percent on aluminium cans and plastic bottles, one of the highest in the world. Finns collect their empties with quiet diligence, and even the most relaxed Finn will carry a returnable bottle around for an hour rather than waste the twenty cents on it. Leaving a returnable behind feels, somehow, faintly irresponsible.

16. Take a number for almost everything

Finnish shops, pharmacies, banks and government offices run on the numbered ticket system. You walk in, take a small paper ticket from a machine on the wall and wait for your number to appear on a screen, even when the place is empty and you are visibly next. The system is calm, fair, and entirely beyond debate, and it sidesteps the awkward British alternative of standing in line while looking faintly aggrieved. The official term for the small machine is vuoronumeroautomaatti, which is also one of the longer words you will encounter in your first week in Finland.

17. Spend summers at a lakeside cottage

The Finnish summer cottage, the mökki, is a cultural institution rather than a luxury. There are roughly half a million of them in a country of 5.5 million, and during July more than a third of the population will spend at least a fortnight at one. The classic mökki has wooden walls, a sauna by the water, a longdrop toilet, no neighbours within easy shouting distance and patchy mobile reception. The whole point is to disconnect, swim, fish, sit in the sauna, light a fire and watch the lake do nothing in particular. Finns regard mökki time as essential to their mental health, and they are not entirely joking when they say so.

18. Celebrate Vappu like the whole country booked the same day off

Vappu, the Finnish May Day, is when the most reserved nation in Europe collectively decides to wear silly white hats and drink sparkling wine in the park. The white caps belong to graduating high-school students, but everyone who has ever graduated keeps theirs, and on the evening of the 30th of April the whole country puts them on at once. Families pack picnics, statues acquire headwear overnight, and the traditional Vappu drink, sima, a mildly fermented lemon mead, is brewed in every other Finnish kitchen in the days running up to it. For one day the silence lifts entirely, and then, on the 2nd of May, everyone goes politely back to normal.

19. Celebrate Midsummer with real commitment

Juhannus, Finnish Midsummer, is the year's most important holiday. Cities empty, businesses close, and Finns retreat to their cottages, light bonfires on the lakeshore and stay up through a night that, north of the polar circle, never really arrives. The bonfire is called a kokko, and the tradition of building one on Midsummer Eve goes back to pre-Christian times, when the fires were thought to ward off bad spirits and ensure a good harvest. The modern version is less concerned with spirits and more concerned with sausages, but the spirit of the thing is the same. The summer cottage roads are quiet, the saunas are full, and the country has, briefly, fallen completely silent.

20. Let children roam independently from a young age

Finnish children are given genuine independence early. Seven-year-olds walk to school alone, eight-year-olds cycle across town to football practice unsupervised, and afternoons in the woods without adult oversight are a normal part of the Finnish childhood. This is possible because Finland is genuinely safe, with one of the lowest crime rates in Europe, and because Finnish society trusts itself to look out for stray children rather than panic over them. The result is a generation of Finnish adults who learned to read a bus timetable before they learned algebra.

21. Read more books than almost anyone else

Finland has the highest library usage rate in the world. There are roughly 1.7 libraries per 10,000 Finns, and the country borrows around 65 million library items per year, close to twelve per person. Libraries here are not optional infrastructure. They are funded as basic public utility, and the central library of Helsinki, Oodi, opened in 2018 as a flagship cultural building rather than as a back-office service. Inside Oodi you can borrow books, sewing machines, power tools, musical instruments and, on a quiet week, the occasional ukulele. None of this is treated as unusual.

None of this is difficult to bring home. The Nordic gifts collection gathers the more giftable corners of Finnish culture in one place, for anyone who has read this far and quietly started making a list.

22. Swear with genuine enthusiasm

Finnish swearing is more expressive and more frequent than the country's reputation for quietness would suggest. The most recognisable example, perkele, was originally the name of a Finnish thunder god, and it has survived three thousand years and several waves of Christianisation to land in the modern Finnish mouth as a word that can mean frustration, determination or grudging admiration depending entirely on how it is delivered. Finns also produce vittu, saatana and helvetti with considerable feeling, often in combination and the country has produced an entire genre of curse-word linguistics. The international image of Finns as constantly swearing is somewhat exaggerated. The image of Finns swearing well is not.

23. Produce an improbable amount of heavy metal

For a country this quiet, Finland produces a startling amount of heavy metal music. It has more metal bands per capita than any other nation on earth, with the Encyclopaedia Metallum putting the count at roughly sixty bands per 100,000 people, more than three times the rate in Sweden and many times the rate in the United States. The 2006 Eurovision Song Contest was won by a Finnish monster-rock band called Lordi, in full prosthetic costume, performing a song called Hard Rock Hallelujah. None of this came as a particular surprise to Finns. The silence, it turns out, has to go somewhere.

24. Queue for a limited-edition bucket

Every so often a Finnish brand will release a special edition plastic bucket, sometimes in a particular colour or pattern, and Finns will queue for it in genuine numbers. Marimekko's Unikko bucket is the most famous example, and similar releases from Fiskars, Iittala and Hackman have all sold out in hours. When the postal service Posti released its own plain orange bucket, Finns queued out of the door for it and resale prices climbed within the week. None of this is ironic. A bucket is honest, useful and built to outlast almost everything around it, which are precisely the qualities Finns respect in an object. The limited run sells out, the news travels quietly, and nobody involved finds any of this strange.

25. Carry a reflector all winter without a hint of embarrassment

Through the long dark months, Finns clip a small reflector, the heijastin, to a coat, a bag, a dog or, occasionally, themselves directly, so that drivers can see them in the gloom. The Finnish road traffic act recommends them for any pedestrian outside built-up areas after dark, and pedestrian deaths in Finland have dropped substantially since the practice became universal in the 1970s. The reflector is sensible rather than stylish, and nobody treats it as a children's accessory. Forgetting yours feels less like a fashion lapse and more like a small failure of personal responsibility.

If any of this is starting to sound familiar, or if you are quietly beginning to wonder whether you might be more Finnish than you realised, the book below has 101 more moments of recognition waiting.

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