Finns tend to be strongly proud of their nation and their typical traditions. According to an original czech article about finnish stereotypes (section Proč má každy Fin doma alespoň jedno pruhované tričko) I decided to extend it by few more things, and came up with a game which you can easily play during visitations to finnish houses and families. I have been invited to many places all around Finland, and I realized that it is more or less the same scheme everywhere.
How to play? Make a table with 3x3 fields, and write inside boxes some of the following things. When you enter a house start crossing things which you can find. The person who manages to fill the whole table is winner, and they should go to prepare sauna turn for rest of the players.
Alternatively, you can also take it as a checklist and give points for every tick you had. If you want to evaluate the level of finnishness of a Finn, you can grant also negative points to make comparable rating.
Things to have in finnish house:
- Sauna
- Moomin mugs
- Anything from Marimekko
- Iittala porcelain
- Vaze from Alvar Aalto
- Newspaper Helsingin sanomat
- Coffee maker for dripped / filtered coffee
- Orange Fiskars scissors
- Do not have curtains on their windows
- Always unlocked doors
- The house is close to a lake
- Having also a summer place
- Having some kind of music instrument
- Having a plug for car heating
If you are not lucky enough to visit Finnish homes, but you want still play this game, you can! I extended it to a human version, so everything what you should need is a paper, pen and couple of finnish friends.
Features to check (give negative points when they are not )
- Blonde
- Tall
- Likes sauna
- Likes salmiakki
- Surname ends with -nen
- Get easily sunburned
- Having a Marimekko bag
- Drinks coffee
- Has student overall
- Has a graduate picture with a sailor hat and/or rose
- Eats pea soup
- Doesn’t speak to strangers
- Likes swimming in the lake
- Likes rye bread
- Plays disc golf
- Wears woolen socks instead of slippers
- Does ice-skating
- Hates swedish
- Does skiing
- likes to sing on sit-sit
- Has two middle names
- Makes dramatical pauses when they are speaking english
- Drives Volvo or Toyota car
- Following Very Finnish problems on Facebook
So in the end, you can easily classify if person which you are speaking is enough Finn or not which is always „good to know“. Please don’t judge people, but one of my friend got -10 points, so I think she have to return her finnish passport…
Article will be updated when I’ll get new ideas, if it’s not enough for you now, continue to this video. If it still not fullfilling for you I can recomend Finnish nightmares series, the issue is that you understood them more and more how you are staying longer in Finland.
