My Hel' Life

The KLM in-flight magazine recently had a blurb about a new book by Sean Condon, My 'Dam Life: Three Years in Holland, about his expat experience. I bought a copy since, well, I'm an expat and thought it would be entertaining to read someone elses' far more interesting adventures in expatriotism than my own.

The book is entertaining if you're an expat or are familiar with Amsterdam. However, he really stretches the material he has to make into a book length tale. It likely would have been much better with a ruthless editor cutting it down into a feature length magazine article. He has a good story, but it bogs down in 250 pages when he spends more time on self-deprecation and less on the larger experience as a whole.

He does, however, nail a few parts of the expat condition terribly well. In particular, the part of trying to fit in without being exposed as a poseur by skating on the just-enough-to-be-dangerous knowledge of the local language.

The barman, a guy around sixty with a face like a wry and maudlin dog, greets me witha nod, which I return before aksing in fractured Dutch for a koffie verkeerd, which translates as coffee the wrong way, deemed wrong because it has melk (milk) in it. After I order a cognac, the barman spurtles another sentence at me, and thinking that he is asking if I want anything else, and pretending to be Dutch but unusually short in stature, I say Nee, dank u wel, (No thanks) and shake my head, feeling semi-bilingual and semi-proud over this brief transaction.

I'm sorry, the barman says, but I asked what sort of cognac you'd prefer ~ Courvoisier, Rémy or Martell? He speaks English perfectly.

Ummm...Rémy Martin, I reply, not leaning too heavily on the French accent. He nods, not patronisingly or anything, just a run-of-the-mill barman's nod. But I need to regain some dignity fast, so I change my coffee order to an espresso and I think I see him smile.

I've had this happen so often in Helsinki that I couldn't help but smile and laugh at someone else going through the same humiliation of being discovered as a fraud. HB is a conversation magnet and people will often stop and spew words at me, usually in the morning before I've had a sufficient amount of coffee, which I have no hope of grasping. I have trouble understanding English before my second cup of coffe, much less a turbo colloquial version of a language that isn't even in the same family as English. I've developed a few techniques for saving face in this kind of situation:

1. Smile and nod if you don't hear a "-ko" on the end of the first word which indicates a question.
2. If there is a "-ko" on the end of the first word, listen for "aika", "paino", etc., which signal questions which you have answers for in Finnish.
3. Keep petting the dog and hope they'll walk on, even if they think you're a little odd.
4. Say nothing and let them think you're mute.
5. If all else fails, admit your finnish isn't so good, hide behind your sunglasses and look at your watch as though you're now running late.

Sure, most Helsinkians speak English reasonably well, but when you're an expat in a country where only 1% of the country's residents aren't Finnish, you want to try to fit-in which means you have to start by faking it and enduring the humiliation when you get busted.

The resident grumpy old cur [GOC] in our apartment house [ it's a law somewhere that says every apartment house must have a meddlesome old fart ] grumbled at me, when I was walking HB through the entryway, about a few strands of dog hair on the hallway rug. We had just moved in so I just smiled and nodded and escaped with the dog as quickly as possible. A few months later, I was out having a smoke when she descended upon me screaming in ferocious Finnish. I looked around me wondering who it was she was yelling at. It was strange as I came to realise it was me she was yelling at since I could no longer hear her and only noticed her bright, bright red painted lips moving at warp speed. When she paused to breathe after 5 minutes of ranting, we had an enchanting conversation [ edited for brevity :) ]:

• <Me> Er, I'm sorry. I'm new here and I don't speak much Finnish yet. Do you speak English?
• <GOC> WHAT?! YOU DON'T SPEEK FEENEESH?!
• <Me> Well...no, not yet. I'm sorry. There are 2 billion English speakers and only 5 million Finnish speakers on the planet mostly because you have to move here to learn Finnish.
• <GOC> WHAT?! YOU COME TO LEEVE HERE AND DON'T SPEEK FEENEESH?!
• [ at which point she looks at me like I've just taken a crap on the sidewalk and started eating it. ]
• <Me> Errr....
• <GOC> YOU MUST NOT SMOKE HERE OR IN THE BUILDING AND YOU HAVE BEEN LEAVING YOUR BUTTS ALL OVER HERE. IT IS FORBIDDEN! [ which she repeats about 20 times since, I guess, not speaking Finnish makes me deaf and stupid ] IS YOUR HUSBAND FEENEESH? I CAN EXPLAIN THIS TO HIM. HE WILL UNDERSTAND.
• <Me> Errr, What? What are you talking about? I, uh, don't smoke in the house and, well, I don't leave my butts on the entryway stairs.
• [ It slowly dawns on me that she has decided to dump on me for every smoker who ever bothered her in life, but especially someone[s] who has taken to smoking in the building and stamping out the butts on the entry stairs. Again, not me. ]
• <GOC> LIAR! I DON'T BELIEVE YOU! IT IS FORBIDDEN! A FEENEESH WOMAN WOULD KNOW THIS!
• [ again repeated 10 or more times at a pitch only dead Finnish husbands and dogs could wholly sympathize with. ]
• <Me> Uhhh.
• [ I was trapped for about 30 minutes while trying to say as little as possible waiting for a moment I could escape before she removed what few shreds of dignity remained. The irony of the story is that it was not, in fact, forbidden to smoke in or around our building. She nearly had me convinced I'd be facing a firing squad shortly. ]

I see her every now and then which invokes a pavlovian response of fear and flight. She says hello, smiles and speaks to me in Finnish which makes me wonder if she has some kind of evil twin living in the apartment with her since this clearly can't be the same woman who reamed me a new one for being a dirty smoking outsider who doesn't speak Finnish. I have a nasty neighbour and Condon deals with the residence police in Holland. It all evens out in the end I suppose.

When you're new to being an expat, you feel exposed and vulnerable if you're completely out of your element. You've gone from being one of "us" to being one of "them" in one short 12-hour flight. Every experience seems new but slowly you realise that it's a well beaten path with oft told tales just like yours. Condon does a reasonable job making the mundane stories funny and entertaining without being boring...like mine. :)

4 Sep 2003 at 15:51, Helsinki