New countries, new habits. While I am this week in Finland on a business trip, I noticed again a few -small- things that reflect on how the country is like.
Again the airport, this time in Helsinki. At the passport control I noticed two things. Firstly the signs were written in English, Chinese and Japanese. I can only speculate on this one, but I very much suspect it has to do with the fact that Nokia, the countries number one company (does 25% of all exports in Finland) is behind or at least influences this. While English is the norm at an airport of course, China is their most important current and future market and then Japan is probably one if not even the overall biggest current market for them.
Natural that you greet them in their languages right at the passport control.
The controller was greeting me in an unexpected "Guten Tag" once he saw my German passport. Lastly they had a small gate that opened and closed only when the controller gave the sign to do so. Nowhere in the world I have seen that.

The book "The Armchair diplomat on Europe" had its Finland section which contained some funny things.

There's positive and negative of course so let's look at the most surprising -to me- positive one; no not the sauna in every building. The Finnish have some of the best designers and design schools in the world. This is due to the enormous amount of wooden timber I guess that they try to do creative things with. Certainly the PowerPoint slide designs that we have seen demonstrated that nicely while the book referred more to buildings and interior design of course.

A great website with nature pictures and nice design elements is Virtual Finland: