One of the things I've noticed over the time I've lived here is that they really like raising the national flag at any event. It has now become customary to wake up, open the curtains and see around 6 flags flapping around in the wind. It happens on average once every fortnight or so I'd say, so now we're always thinking wow, I wonder what has happened in Finland today?! It has got to the stage where I've got the offical days in Finland listing tabbed in my history file on the computer.

There are apparently 19 offical days during the year by which the flag has to be flown. Plus any days when there are any form of parliamentary or local elections, along with any refurendums or EU elections. So we'll go with say, 20 a year. Which is an average of once every 18 days... so I actually was not too far off on my calculations of once every fortnight! There are going to be another 5 occassions where the flag is raised before I go home, and I go home in around 6 weeks time. We're raising it for various things including national war vetrans day (27th april), Vappu which is the day of Finnish labour and everyone apparently goes crazy (1st May), Mothers day, the death of a Statesman (12th May) and also the birthday of the marshal of Finland (4th june).

Yesterday it was to celebrate the Finnish language and the reason they had it on 9th April was because the man who invented the written Finnish language (Mikael Agricola) died on that day.

Flag days here are so interesting as I have certainly never seen this many union jacks, st georges or st andrews crosses when I've been in the UK. We don't have as many offical days as in Finland and probably more importantly, we don't raise as many flags when we do. At home they have one on my local parish church on offical days, but nothing to the extent that they do here. I can't walk up my street without every house and shop flying a flag and once you get into the main streets in the city I think they have flag poles every 10m or so as they're systematically all over the place, and flying from buildings too. I've just checked on wikipedia and there isn't even a page entitled 'UK flag days' or 'English/Scottish flag days'. Finland gets its entire own entry!!

One of the things I've noticed whilst I've been here is how proud the Finns are to be Finnish. They're a very proud nation and are very proud of their language, their culture and their country. Much more so than we are in the UK. For example on the Finnish Independence day in November all of the students do a massive parade around the streets and they all met in the central square for a talk by the president, and singing of the national anthem. That would never happen in the UK - we don't all go off into the streets on November 11th for example and thank our grand fathers for keeping our country indendent during the war. The independence day is from when Finland became seperate again from Russia. I don't know if it is because we as the UK have never been taken (other than the Channel Islands in WW2) and therefore we've never not been free, but here there is certainly such a sense of pride for being Finnish which I've never experienced at home. Its as though they are sandwiched between two "powers" of Sweden and Russia and everyone forgets about them, so they like being different. It's a similar thing to what I experienced in Mongolia, a sandwich between Russia and China. I don't even speak the language here and I can sense it. Finns don't expect you to speak their language as its almost their special thing which makes them different from foreigners, as its bloody hard to try and learn Finnish as its not like any other European language and they know that, which is why I think they're so proud of it. Another thing is that in Finland they have the only group of indigenous peoples in Europe - the Sami People, who live in the Suomi Lappi - so they're still keeping hold of all of their previous traditions through them.

I think its interesting that despite the fact I have very little to do with Finland or Finnish people I still see this emense pride and love of their country. In fact, I'd probably say that the Finns are some of the most patriotic out of all of the nationalities I've met on erasmus, probably followed by the Lithuanians (and Latvians and Estonians) who are all very very proud of their nations identity. British people just don't have that pride, we're ashamed to be British. Or, especially, ashamed to be English.

(Just another normal, fun week in Helsinki - although I haven't drunk alchol since sunday, which is certainly the longest I've gone without drinking since I arrived here, which is bad given its only 5 days!)