Hear a bit about Finland from our current exchange student, Elias!

Finland is land that is known for quiet people and lot of drinking. I think people in the world think that Finland is just cold forest and they cannot place Finland on maps.

It is kind of true what people think in the world, but Finland is lot more than just cold forest, for example Finnish culture is great.
If we meet new people in Finland, we are really quiet and socially awkward, but when people really start getting to know about each other, people become much more open.

 In Finland there is that thing that we don’t snitch about our friends no matter what and everybody can really trust each other in the friend group that makes friends sometimes more important than parents.
I think that most people of my age are more with their friends than with their parents. For example I go home usually just to get food or sleep.

Winters in Finland are usually quite cold and long.
When it’s really cold in winter at Finland it’s like -30°C but usually it’s close about -15°C.
Summers in Finland are just nice, there is everywhere green and the weather is about 25°C all the time. The winter is really dark in Finland and there are times when the sun doesn't really even rise at all.

Finland is known for people drinking heaps of alcohol!

Finland people love beer and that’s what everybody drinks they do all l the time, not only to get drunk but also because of its taste.

The Finnish school system is rated as one of the best in the world. We have the most motivated teachers working at Finnish schools and there are a lot of teachers for small groups of students.
We start our school at preschool until  we are 6 years old and after that we have 6 years primary school. After we have gone through primary school we move to secondary school where we are 3 year.

When you turn 16 years old you can choose whether you want to go to high school or vocational school.
I chose to go high school and I’m now in second grade there. School in Finnish high schools is really challenging compared to other countries and big part of people barely get through courses.
We have five seasons in one year. In one season we have about six school subjects, that make our school days pretty long and full.

We have pretty different school subjects in Finland than what you have in New Zealand. For example we don’t have PE at our school at all but we still have some pretty weird school subjects.
I guess there is nowhere else in the world school subjects like wood craft or domestic science. We must learn heaps of different hard school subjects  like Swedish and chemistry to get through of classes. Finnish school are still mainly quite chill if you just do all the work that you need to do.

Finnish culture. Finnish people love sauna and we have more saunas than cars in our country. We go to sauna at least three times in week and we still don’t get bored doing that.

Example me and my boys used to go sauna every Wednesday and we were there at least couple hours straight. With sauna we usually go to swim on lakes. In winter we make hole on the ice and we swim there couple minutes.

We have quite similar food as in New Zealand, but we still have some Finnish food like ‘poronkärisys or karjalanpaisti’ and those are really good and tasty.

There are a lot more things in Finland Culture, but here are main things. Just ask if you want know something more about Finland.

Elias Niemelä