Thursday, January 12, 2006

I think I should be angry

Every time there is some public discussion on bringing foreign workforce to Finland, somebody (usually many people) point out that nobody in their right mind would come to Finland from another developed country, and there must be something seriously wrong with the people who do. I think I should be angry at these statements, but they are so common and so similar to each other that I stopped actually getting angry (on any emotional level) after the first 128 times or so.

Still, I often wonder: do many of the people I meet IRL instantly think that there must be something wrong with me just because I moved here?

In addition, I got an impression that those same people do not consider moving from, say, UK to Germany or from Belgium to Netherlands to be a sign of being seriously fucked in the head. For the life of me I can't imagine why they single out Finland like that. At least from the point of view of a young American wanting to go to Europe that I was N years ago Finland was a European country like any other. I mean: cute guys, rye bread and a weird language that I wanted to learn sort of sealed my choice of a country, but apart from that Finland did not stand out in any positive or negative way before I moved here.

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