Geoffrey comments

The first time I went to Finland was in 2010 through the Swedish border town of Haparanda which Eva and I reached by bus. There was no public transport connection to the other side of the border, a town called Tornio so we had to walk it, fortunately only about 2 km.

There is a train station in Tornio but there were no passenger trains which required us to get another bus to our next destination of Oulu. The bus driver didn’t speak English and pointing to Eva and myself with the word ‘Oulu’ only produced puzzlement. It seems I wasn’t pronouncing it correctly so a Swedish guy who could speak Finnish came to our aid. He said to us ‘welcome to Eastern Scandinavia’ which was a reference to the way West Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall referred to those in the East as ‘Ossies.’ Lack of knowledge of any language in Finland other than Finnish is apparently not unusual in small places. Later we were told than even though Swedish is an official language in Finland, schoolkids have almost no interest in learning it.