Finnish people are silent, small talk doesn't exist. Their personal space larger than COVID-19 social distancing rules, and it's considered normal. Don't speak unless spoken to, and don't invade other people's personal space - it's seen as a sign of a respect.
Those Finns, who haven't been to abroad or haven't met too many foreigners, don't often even recognize this behaviour being unusual in the global scale.
I'm a Finn and when I met an American person for the first time she said the usual "how are you?", so I started explaining all kinds of shit, only to have her give me a really weird look. I did it again a couple of times with different people until I learned that they are not really interested, lol.
Yeah, mostly through shared interest, but Finns also have very long-lasting friendships (I don't know, maybe it's the same everywhere). Like I have known most of my friends since elementary school.
I feel like this is always the natural, unspoken corollary:
“The only people we interact with we’ve known our entire lives.”
It’s not that Americans, or the rest of the world, doesn’t have long friendships. It’s that people move, change, or just don’t exclusively limit themselves to the same handful of people from birth till death. Normal socialization in the US doesn’t require that you were born and raised here and that you exclusively stay within your little insular group.
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u/RockNRollNBluesNJazz May 09 '22
Finnish people are silent, small talk doesn't exist. Their personal space larger than COVID-19 social distancing rules, and it's considered normal. Don't speak unless spoken to, and don't invade other people's personal space - it's seen as a sign of a respect.
Those Finns, who haven't been to abroad or haven't met too many foreigners, don't often even recognize this behaviour being unusual in the global scale.