There have been a few things in the papers recently about the difficulty of getting a job in Finland if you don't speak Finnish.

According to a Polish journalist who was sent here (while other colleagues were sent to other EU countries) while people are quite happy to interview you in English they then won't offer you even a cleaning job if you don't speak and write Finnish.

One of the odd things she reported was that having had an interview she was asked to fill in an application form. She couldn't because it was only in Finnish.

My suspicion is that it IS possible to get a job in Finland if you only speak English, but that it has to be a job in your field; has to be for a multi-national with factories in your country (and the desire to send you back there later). In such a case - and provided you interview while you are still in a quality job in your own country, you might avoid this need to speak Finnish.

If however you are already in the country you are firstly only considered suitable for menial jobs and then there's also this Finnish-speaking requirement.

Of course this is being far too general, but I suspect there's a lot of sense in it.

I, on the other hand, almost didn't get a job in Finland when I applied while living in Germany in a quality job, because I did speak some Finnish (which was worse than I thought it was) and expected this to be an advantage. It was only when I'd clearly messed up one interview by making sure that was known, that I decided that future interviews would be in English only which led to me getting a couple of job offers. But if I'd only had one interview, speaking Finnish would have meant that I wouldn't have got a job in Finland. Ironic isn't it?

The other thing that has been in the paper was a story about the American husband (of someone who had lived in Finland for a while before moving on to the US) greeting everyone he met with a friendly "Good Morning" only to have people look away or look at him as if he were mad.

This was the Helsinki area of course. In the country *and in the summer* people might have replied but not here. I don't actually think that particularly odd. I doubt that people in say New York would regard someone saying "Good Morning" to everyone they meet as particularly sane. Certainly in the large towns and cities in Europe that I've spent most of my working life in, it isn't done.

So that was a particularly stupid example in my view and hardly worth writing about. What does intensively annoy most foreigners is that they get the same response when exchanging a casual sentence or two when at a more common location for such a conversation (or rather when *trying* to exchange a casual sentence or two)

At a bus stop say. In England no-one would take amiss at a normal attempt for a small chat while waiting for a bus. Here you'd speak and they would almost invariably look straight through you as if hadn't said anything.

This is why people in the cash desks in this country always say the same phrases to all their customers. They need to be trained to do so. Casual random chatting with customers just wouldn't happen otherwise.

If you think about it it's also the reason why the "ha ha" semi-humorous small chat between the two (man and woman of course) news anchors always seems so forced. It is forced. They have to practise it for hours as a casual remark to each other at the end of the program would otherwise be beyond them.

A "relative" of mine (by marriage x 2) wrote in her blog before she quit Finland after less than a year of a planned two year stay that maybe if she'd lived in the countryside she could have had more normal contact with strangers. She's wrong, I'm sure, she's mainly (only?) been in the country in the summer - even Helsinki people occasionally speak in the summer ... Just not to people walking towards them and saying "Good Mornng".