Finland – the peculiar land of lakes and sauna.

I just got back from this year’s edition of the Drachenfest LARP festival and my annual summer holidays, so I haven’t had much time for blog writing. I definitely have a fun story to tell you about our in-game shenanigans, but before that you get another Travel Trivia post from the archives that I hadn’t gotten around to posting until now. Yes, I know, two Travel Trivia posts in a row is not my style, but you all seem to like them, so enjoy!

Finland is probably one of the most peculiar countries I’ve ever visited, so this Travel Trivia post is going to make you go a bit whaaat?. Let’s learn some new fascinating facts about the Suomi land of sauna and lakes:

• As you might know already, Finland is not a part of Scandinavia and its language is in a league of its own in the Finno-Ugric group with Hungarian. In fact, it is not even an Indo-European language like most of the languages in European countries, but rather an Uralic language and it is more similar to Estonian than to Swedish or Norwegian.
• Finland is consistently ranked amongst the top happiest countries in the world according to the Happiness report.
• There are 187,888 lakes within the Finnish territory, which is why it is also known as the land of the 1000 lakes.

• There are more saunas than cars in Finland and even their Burger King in Helsinki has a sauna. A lot of Finns also have saunas in their apartments, like the woman I was couchsurfing with in Helsinki.
• The Finnish national candy is Salmiakki, a sort of salty liquorice snack, which I personally find disgusting.
• Finland was the first country in Europe to grant women the right to vote in 1906.
• Much like Slovenia, my home country, Finland has free education at all levels. Also, when someone earns their PhD, they get a top hat and a sword (I wish!).
• They are also known for some pretty bizarre sports competitions, such as the wife-carrying championship (the prize is the wife’s weight in beer), swamp football, mobile throwing championship, air guitar world championship (I have a friend who competed), and mosquito hunting.
• Speaking of air guitar, metal is a huge music thing in Finland and there are more metal bands per capita than anywhere else in the world.
• Santa Claus lives in Finland and you can visit him and his reindeer in the Santa Claus village near Rovaniemi.

Well, I hope you liked this edition of Travel Trivia! Let me know in the comments if I made a mistake somewhere or if you know any other fun facts about Finland. 🙂