I have landed. . .

July 6, 2025 • 10:00 am

.  . . in Helsinki, the beginning point of our Arctic cruise. I will be here for a day and a half, and then, as I recall, we fly to Svalbard to board the ship.  Then it’s on to various islands to see things like puffins, walruses (walri?), whales, and (fingers crossed) polar bears.

Finland is living up to its stereotype today: although it’s not cold, it’s gray and overcast, though not rainy. At 5 p.m. here, as I write this, it’s 58°F (14°C).  I’m staying right next to the airport, which is where they put us.  I came a day early in case there was flight issues, as Finnair, the carrier I booked, is going through a massive company strike. Fortunately, the work stoppages are sporadic, so I arrived on time and can relax tomorrow.  That’s when we check in for the trip, so I have no plans to see Helsinki.

Scandanavians speak superb English, which is something you notice instantly, beginning with the flight attendants on the plane. Most of the signs, in fact, have English as their first language, with Finnish and other European languages below. Here’s a bit of the Wikipedia entry on the language:

Finnish  is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish. In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish) are official minority languages. Kven, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian counties of Troms and Finnmark by a minority of Finnish descent.

and this:

Finnish belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family; as such, it is one of the few European languages that is not Indo-European. The Finnic branch also includes Estonian and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in Russia’s Republic of Karelia. The closest relative of Finnish is either Ingrian, or depending on the definition, Karelian.

And if you look up Ingrian or Karelian, you’ll find that both of these related languages are endangered, with Ingrian having only about 70 native speakers left, most of them old.

So that you can see what Finnish looks like, and notice instantly that it’s not Indo-European, I’ve used Google translate to convert my first paragraph at the beginning into Finnish:

…Helsingissä, arktisen risteilymme lähtöpisteessä. Olen täällä puolitoista päivää, ja sitten muistaakseni lennämme Huippuvuorille nousemaan laivaan. Sitten suuntaamme eri saarille tarkkailemaan esimerkiksi lunneja, mursuja ja (peukut pystyssä) jääkarhuja.

I’m really glad that English is so widespread here; learning Finnish would be a bear!

Oh, and the Finnair flight was okay, but not outstanding.  The movies were a pretty lame selection, and since I can’t sleep on long-haul flights, I watched three on our nearly nine-hour trip: two good HBO bio-documentaries, one about Elizabeth Taylor (based on tape recordings she made with her friend Roddy McDowell) and the other about Faye Dunaway, including a long recent interview in which she recounts and assesses her life. She’s now 84, and that’s hard to believe if you watched her great performanc in “Bonnie and Clyde” when she was just 26.  By all admissions, including hers, she’s very hard to work with but a master of her craft.  Dunaway is regarded by her fellow actors of one of the best of their group in the last 60 years or so (I’d forgotten many of her outstanding performances, including those in “Chinatown” and “Network”).

I also learned that Taylor was married eight times to seven men (Richard Burton twice), and converted permanently to Judaism in 1959 when she was 27 (she died in 2011).

Finally, for lack of a better movie that I hadn’t already seen, I watched “Gladiator II.” I thought the first “Gladiator” movie (as seen on a plane) was okay, but I recommend that you give this one a wide miss. It’s tedious.

I’ll stay up as long as I can (it’s 5:30 pm here as I write this, and then I’m going to crash—hard).

30 thoughts on “I have landed. . .”

  1. Yes, I was in Denmark on business once, and a local explained that they all started learning foreign languages early. He said, there are only four and a half million of us, no one is going to learn Danish. And, of course, Finnish is much harder than Danish.

  2. I hope your flights work out. I was meant to be flying Milan-Helsinki-Hong Kong tomorrow (Monday) however Finnair gave up on trying to move people and they’ve rerouted me via Bangkok on Thai Air. So I’ll have to try another time for the “okay but not outstanding“ service!
    It’s CHAOS right now in Europe (or it seems that way to me. To be fair most of it’s working.) My flight last Thursday from Gatwick to Milan was the last to leave without 4+ hour delays or cancellation due to a French air traffic controller strike. Then there’s the Helsinki airport strike drama. Starting tomorrow there’s a nationwide Italian train strike that I’m only just getting out hours before. I feel like I have miraculously threaded the needle.

  3. There is a substantial minority population of Swedish-speaking people in Finland with their own schools and a Swedish-speaking university. Historically they represent the class that ran the country. Many of them don’t speak Finnish fluently. Because there is still some bad feeling between the two populations, a Swedish-speaking Finn who needs to communicate to a Finnish speaking Finn may speak English.

    1. Trivia: One of the best-known Finns of Swedish origin is Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, by the way. He was a Finnish military commander and statesman.

      From Wikipedia:

      Participants in a Finnish survey taken 53 years after his death voted Mannerheim the greatest Finn of all time.[9] During his own lifetime he became, alongside Jean Sibelius, the best-known Finnish personage at home and abroad.[3] According to Finnish historian Tuomas Tepora, a cult of personality began to be built around Mannerheim right after the civil war.[10]

      Given the broad recognition in Finland and elsewhere of his unparalleled role in establishing and later preserving Finland’s independence from the Soviet Union, Mannerheim has long been referred to as the father of modern Finland,[11][12][13][14][15] and the New York Times called the Finnish capital Helsinki’s Mannerheim Museum, memorializing the leader’s life and times, “the closest thing there is to a [Finnish] national shrine”.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_Emil_Mannerheim

  4. Very cool, PCC(E). Safe travel. I mentioned Finnish here yesterday as an interesting language: totally unrelated to its neighbors (I’ve studied and speak bad Russian).

    They have s/t like 16 cases which is… amazing. To learn it would do one’s head in.
    I guess before the internet/media they’d just sit hunkered down through those long snowy winters just making up cases and tenses just for kicks!
    And the women (I believe, I’ve not visited) look even more impressive.

    all the best,

    D.A.
    NYC

  5. “Here’s a song about my favorite city : Helsinki

    …

    A Foggy Day …”

    -Frank Sinatra
    Paris
    1962

    1. Mita Koolu Antti (of uncertain gender but I’m sure you’re certain of it!).
      I bought a phrasebook once – I have a lot of language phrasebooks, they’re the entry drug to a language habit but “Suomi” terrified me from the phrasebook starting line!

      I’m pretty damn competent in Japanese as I lived there, but Finnish scares me with all those cases.

      best,

      D.A.
      NYC

        1. aaand now I’m fk’ed. I shall look it up as I doubt my phrasebook covers it Mr or Mrs. Ronka. (How do you get those cool dots, btw? I’d love some.)

          D.A.
          NYC
          ps Silly me. I’m fine, thank you for asking. HA! Should have written:
          ”Mitä kuuluu”
          all the best,
          D.A

  8. Ackschually Finland has been granted the rank of Nordic, but it is not considered Scandinavian.

    And Finnish isn’t hard. Just use ‘Perkele’ in various intonations.

    (The things you learn from the Scandinavia and the World webcomic)

  9. I was under the impression that the Finnish and Hungarian languages were distant cousins. And that Finland was a Nordic country but not Scandinavian.
    Have a great trip.

    1. Correct, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, as explained to me, are part of the Scan peninsula (I guess it must be a double peninsula, with Denmark being part of it), but Finland isn’t.

      And Finnish and Hungarian, as I read once somewhere, are related in syntax / word order, not so much in the words themselves.

    2. Iceland is also sometimes considered a Scandinavian country, based on language and culture. The word for those countries with Finland is “Nordic”.

      Finnish and Hungarian are very distantly related, probably more distantly than Irish and Sanskrit (both Indo-European languages). The technical term is “Finno-Ugric”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages though the details of the classification are disputed.

      Estonian is closely related to Finnish. More distantly related is Sami, the language spoken by the “indigenous” population of present-day Norway, Sweden, Finland, and northwestern Russia. (“Sami” is not coincidientally similar to “Suomi”, the Finnish word for “Finland”.)

      The literacy rate IN ENGLISH is higher in Finland than in some countries where English is an official language. Swedish is a minority language in Finland. Everyone still learns it, but most prefer to speak English with Swedes: then they are both speaking a foreign language, most Finnish people speak English better than Swedish, and Swedish has the taint of “language of the colonizers” (though of course colonization is also what led English to become a lingua franca, though Finland was never colonized by English speakers).

      VERY big in Finland: tango (the dance).

  10. According to legend, long ago the Finno-Ugrian migrants reached the alfold or great Hungarian plain, and found a signpost which read: “Good Farm Land Here”.
    Those who could read settled down and farmed. Those who could not read kept moving north.

    1. Yes, I understand the above (both of you) to be true.

      Razib Khan wrote a long twitter post on Finnish genetics recently and, like their language, they are a people apart. Fascinating and I’m jealous of PCC(E)’s trip there however brief.

      all the best guys,

      D.A.
      NYC

  11. You’ve just about mastered the Maori language; Finnish is next.

    Looking forward to your travelogue. Oh wait. This is the beginning of the travelogue!

  12. When I was in Helsinki once on the market square, several times I heard people speaking Finnish, but using Swedish words for numbers. Finland is officially bilingual, and so later I asked a Finnish friend there if I was hearing native Swedish-speakers speaking Finnish. Nope, he said, they just use Swedish numbers because they’re just so much simpler.

    As an example, nineteen hundred eighty five is tuhat yhdeksänsataa kahdeksankymmentäviisi in Finnish, and nittonhundra åttiofem in Swedish.

    If you do go into town, there’s a very pleasant and very wide boulevard called Esplanadi, with nice restaurants and such.

    Meanwhile, there is much nervousness on the Russian border with Finland and the Baltic States, esp Estonia, right now.

    1. You reminded me that a number of years ago I took the over-night ship from Stockholm to Helsinki, and during the dinner onboard I sat with a couple, he from Finland, she from Sweden. They said that they spoke English to one another, since he didn’t want to learn Swedish, and she had no intention of learning Finnish!

      My more recent, similar encounter was in Tarragona, Spain, where I sat with hundreds of people in a small town square watching the finals of the world cup ‘football’ match that was being televised on dozens of TVs that had been dragged out into the square. I sat with an older woman and her daughter at the only table with a couple of empty seats, and we chatted briefly in English. I asked, “Are you Danish?” and the woman said “yes, how could tell?” Easy, I said, your English is better than mine….

  13. What ship are you boarding in Svalbard? If it’s the Greg Mortimer, please give my regards to the crew. I’ve just come off that ship on a trip organised by New Scientist. Svalbard is amazing. We saw a polar bear (visible only with binoculars) and walruses. Very few puffins, but huge numbers of guillemots on their breeding ledges and hurtling over the water. The ship’s bow slicing through the sea ice was quite an experience.

  14. I’m always amazed on the occasions our friend above messages here, almost surreal.
    Like playing pick-up basketball in the neighborhood and LaBron James just saunters in.
    Welcome as always Prof. Dawkins!

    D.A.
    NYC

  15. Regarding Faye Dunaway, there are surely at least a few thespian masters of their craft who are not very hard to work with. Perhaps they are not sufficiently possessed of a breath-taking sense of entitlement.

  16. Welcome to Finland 😉💙💚🇺🇸✈️🇫🇮. I hope you can some day visit in Helsinki 😉💙💚🏙️✈️🇫🇮. But I’m very happy that you did small visit in my home country 😉💙💚🇺🇸✈️🇫🇮. Maybe we can some day meet and talk about evolution 😉💙💚🦕🦖. I hope you can see ice bear in arctic 😉💙💚🐻‍❄️🌍❄️.

  17. When you say something Finnish, like the name of a person or place, always stress the first syllable. If there’s a double letter, pronounce it twice (e.g. Pekka is Pek-ka). Kiitos is thank you and kiipis is cheers. Or so I’ve been told!

    1. Ha, when I first went to Finland a very large bearded Finnish ecologist scornfully said that “kiipis” is for foreigners. All you are supposed to do is pick up your glass, make eye contact with the other person, and drink. No talking necessary. Or desired. 🙂

      But the rest of your comment is in keeping with what I know.

  18. Well the boss’ Finland stopover certainly resulted in an abundance of pleasant and interesting opinions and an appreciation of Finnish emojis!
    🙂 All the best our Arctic Finno Ugric Friends! One day you’ll see ME there!

    D.A.
    NYC

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