Exotic Finland?

Ek­soot­ti­nen Suomi

Peo­ple liv­ing in Fin­land don’t al­ways no­tice how beau­ti­ful and unique na­ture in their home­land is. Have you ever en­joyed the mid­night sun or watched north­ern lights wav­ing in the sky? And have you re­al­ized that Fin­land is one of the few coun­tries in the whole world where those phe­nom­ena can be seen. Well, many peo­ple haven’t. They look for ex­oti­cism abroad while they could just walk out and see if they could look to the right places.

Ex­otic is some­thing new, some­thing strange and some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing. That is why we can’t see it in Fin­land; ev­ery­thing is old and bor­ing. We don’t ap­pre­ci­ate our never-end­ing forests, thou­sands of lakes, un­spoilt na­ture or an­i­mals which all don’t want to kill us like in Aus­tralia, for ex­am­ple. How­ever, Fin­land is de­scribed as an ex­otic re­sort to peo­ple from the South. I do be­lieve that be­cause I have trav­elled and read about so many coun­tries and I have started to un­der­stand how ap­peal­ing our na­ture can be.

All of the four sea­sons can be seen in Fin­land. There is some­thing won­der­ful in each of them. In win­ter it is the snow. In fall it is au­tumn fo­liage. The mid­night sun in the sum­mer. And in spring it is lovely to see how na­ture wakes up from win­ter sleep. There are so many ex­otic phe­nom­ena in Fin­land that it would be fool­ish to say it isn’t ex­otic.