Exotic Finland?

To ques­tion whether Fin­land can be clas­si­fied as ex­otic one must first clar­ify what “be­ing ex­otic” means. Surely any­thing can be ex­otic to a per­son un­fa­mil­iar with it. Ex­otic in a nut­shell or at least in the nut­shell that is my head means that a sub­ject such as en­vi­ron­ment de­vi­ates from what an in­di­vid­ual per­ceives as nor­mal. And by that def­i­ni­tion Fin­land is most def­i­nitely as ex­otic as any of the coun­tries in the world. This para­graph in it­self is rather short for a com­po­si­tion so I ought to elu­ci­date a lit­tle.

Ev­ery year we Finns have got­ten used to see­ing tourist groups of Asian eth­nic­ity. Some have even found their way to Kuo­pio on oc­ca­sion and, at first glance, didn’t seem to be lost at all. At first I per­son­ally found this phe­nom­e­non quite in­trigu­ing. Surely, if Asian tourists travel to Eu­rope, they want to see the great cities such as Lon­don and Rome or bask in the sun­light of the Mediter­ranean. Slowly I be­gan to re­al­ize that al­beit rest of the world hav­ing its up­sides, Fin­land too, has some ex­otic charm to its name.

If you’ve lived your whole life in an in­dus­tri­al­ized me­trop­o­lis, the pu­rity Finnish forests must truly seem ex­otic. Even the sen­sa­tion that is fairly white snow might seem in­com­pre­hen­si­ble to the most ur­ban­ized peo­ple. We might lack the veg­e­ta­tion and fauna of the Ama­zon but so does ev­ery other cor­ner of the world. What might seem dull to us, might be ex­otic for some­one else. We be­come ex­otic by be­ing dif­fer­ent. The ex­otic is truly in the eye of the be­holder.

Anni Ol­likainen