Answers to Steph's questions

So in the spirit of answering all of my comments I'm making a post to try to answer all of Steph's questions to the best of my ability.So here goes.

What is a typical weekday entail?

For my husband a typical weekday entails waking up and going to work from 9 to 5. Its my observation that this is the typical for most Finnish people who are working. Although it might be more common to work from 8 to 4. One thing is for sure that during the week most grocery stores, department stores or cafes are not open past 21.00/9pm. So this means of course that most Finns don't work at all past 21.00. There are no 24 hour businesses in our small town and there are only a few 24 hour businesses in the bigger cities of Finland that I've visited.

 After that we usually 2 times a week go to the grocery store and get basic supplies. This has to be done much more frequently than people would usually do in the USA because of the reduced size of fridges in Finland, and also because bread and milk only last a fraction of the time that those same goods last in the States. Then its home and dinner usually cooked at home. There is far more home cooking in Finland than I ever observed in USA. Perhaps that's heavily colored by my own bias and experiences. 


Weekends? 

Weekends for my household are generally spent at home spending time on our hobbies or watching tv together. Often we read a lot of books, or just go out for a drive to nowhere. At least once on the weekend there is sauna for all Finns. It is likely that many Finns also go to sauna at some point during the week as well as it is a huge part of Finnish culture.

Most young people or people of my age are not married and don't have kids so they spend lots of times going to the clubs and drinking on the weekends. This however varies by season, in the summer more people go to their summer cabins and cottages for the weekends and of course for the whole month that they have off from work. This means that they have a traditional wood fire sauna instead of the electric sauna that most people have access to in their homes.

What do most people do for entertainment? 

Movies are probably the most common thing for entertainment outside of the bar scene. Finns are generally quite heavy drinkers and drinking is a large part of the culture especially among younger people. However, in our town of Salo, we have the most used library in  the country. So we like many others in our town we visit the library and take full advantage of it. Barbecues and having friends over are also quite common as a way to entertain.

How different is it in a large city compared to a small town? 

I don't really have any experience living in a large city, I mean as large as cities get here, you have to consider that there are only 5 million people in all of Finland, that's less people than live Philadelphia for example. But in Helsinki, the capitol, where we've visited many times the main things that I've noticed is the cost of things is much higher and traffic is far worse. At the same time there is a much larger public transportation network in the bigger cities. 

The small town we live in is very much ideal for us because there are bike paths and bus lines that can get you pretty much anywhere in the main part of town that you would need to go. But really for most people in our town a car is still needed due to the fact that many smaller outlying towns have been incorporated into our municipality in the past decades so actually Salo spreads across a great land area with long stretches of road through the country between the populated areas.


I'm really sorry that I didn't address Sweden at all but as I haven't actually stepped foot in Sweden I don't have any real experience as to what life is like there. I hope this post has answered some of your questions and please feel free to ask more. This was a great bunch of questions that I really enjoyed answering.