Looking back... I think this qualifies as a large dose of culture shock
A preface to my more conservative readers..... Drinking is a large part of the culture here in Finland and especially so among exchange students. However, I am not one to drink very much in general. Even though this story and several others refer to drinking many times, don't worry... I am a grown woman who enjoys tasting a new beer or wine, but I'm always the sober one in all these stories. Hahahaha
Also, THIS story in particular may be one of the craziest things that has EVER happened to me. Don't say I didn't warn you before hand...
So Catherine (North Carolina) and I decided to run around town and check out a few more clubs. We couldn't resist visiting a bar named Redneck. We each got an apple cider and roamed around looking at all the "Redneck" things they were using for decorations. We were sitting and talking in the back when two girls sat at a table next to us. They soon were inviting us to sit with them and talk to them. Turns out, the talking part wasn't so easy. haha One of the girls spoke very little broken English, her friend... none at all. Cat and I don't speak Finnish either, so we had a good time TRYING to talk to one another. We found out that they were from a near by town and just visiting for the night. The girl who spoke a little English was only 17 and her friend was 18. They were both VERY drunk. (Legal drinking age is 18 in Finland) It seems to be the case that the bars here are overrun with creepy old drunk men and one of them found our table and decided he liked our new 17 year old friend. She was more than happy to take the drinks he was bringing her, but she quickly changed her mind once he started trying to seriously hit on her. Language barrier aside we got the hint that she wanted to be "saved" from this guy. So the four of us went outside for a smoke (only one person in the group was actually a smoker) Cat and I ended up... carrying... dragging..?? the 17 year old as best we could out of the bar and by the time we made it outside her friend and the old man.... WERE GONE. Yes.... this is were the weird stuff starts and actually all this is stretched out over SEVERAL hours.... So, Cat and I are confused and worried about what to do... We have just acquired a drunken 17 yr old and we are all three very worried about her missing friend. I go back in the bar to ask the bartender if she saw anything or knows anything. She tells us that they were talking about going to another bar downtown. So, we start walking and looking for this place. We find it eventually... and the 17yr old is so drunk they won't let her in. So I have to go inside and search this bar for her friend. Not an easy task to locate someone you've only just met an hour ago. No luck finding her. I get back outside and we ask the girl to try calling her friend.... "ring ring ring" oh.... the 17 yr old has her friend's phone!! sigh.... We go look in other bars as well and finally decide we are going to go get some food and water and try to sober this girl up. I finally have the idea to call my friend Juho who IS Finnish and see if he can translate / talk to her and see what's going on. We have no idea where her friend is, she doesn't live in Jyvaskyla, and we have no idea where to take her so that she can be safe. We find out that she is also in foster care so that ups the stakes EVEN more for calling the police. She's only 17 so she would automatically get in trouble for being drunk... We finally decide to try once more to look for her friend... THEN we would call the cops. We go back to Redneck to see if her friend came back or not, no she didn't. BUT THEN - she gets a phone call. Its the friend! She's back in their hotel room with all their other friends... and turns out... the hotel is DOWNTOWN. (This would have been nice to know about 3 hours ago) So great! Now we can deliver her to her friends and say gooooood niiight! It's not that easy.... Turns out... the drunken 17 year old can't remember WHERE the hotel is. A few more phone calls later, we get a name for the hotel at least.... but no address.... We finally found a random Finnish guy walking downtown and ask him for directions. The drunken 17 yr old is going on and on and on in Finnish to him. We have no clue what's going on now... He isn't from Jyvaskyla either but his friends are and they can meet us and show us where this place is. GREAT! We're making progress!! We told the guy thank you many times, he insisted no thanks was needed. On the way there... The girl pulls a beer out of her purse, and rips off the cap with her TEETH. She drank the beer quicker than we could take it away from her....We arrive at the front of a hotel... not the one we had the name for.... and now... It's me, Cat, drunk girl... and Three Finnish guys..... standing in front of a hotel.... I DON'T like this... I pull Cat aside and tell her this is bad news and we need to get away from these guys. She quickly agrees. However, convincing the drunk girl turned out to be MUCH more difficult. She has now decided she wants to go with these guys instead of staying with us... We try and try to tell her this isn't safe and that she should just let us help her. The guys are all just standing around we tell them to just walk away, they just laugh. We tell them she's only 17 years old and are told "So what, I'm 18". At this point she has her hands all over the guy that was helping us with directions and is she getting mad at us for trying to get her away from him. We finally pull her aside and try to talk to her. At this point, I see the directions guy getting money out of the ATM machine. Now I am putting more and more pieces of the puzzle together... and we beg her to get away from these guys.... this... this would be about the time she HIT ME. Yes.... She punched me in the chest. I was DONE with her after that. I threw my hands up, screamed a few obscenities and starting walking away. Cat was also really angry at this point. We had both gone out of our way, spent our entire night trying to help this girl... and then she acts this way?!? The more and more we talked about it and thought about the entire night... We start realizing that this girl and her friend.... were mostly likely prostitutes. This would explain why the friend suddenly disappeared with the older guy and really explains the fiasco at the end of the night. All through the night... she kept talking to every man she saw on the street... It was in Finnish of course, so we have no clue what as being said.. but looking back at the way they reacted..it all makes sense now. It was very difficult to deal with emotionally for me, I can't speak for Cat.... but I felt anger, sadness, confusion, embarrassment... I wanted to help this girl and I ended up feeling like she used us.
Cat and I were both very very angry as we started walking home and one of those old creepy men almost paid the price for it. He started following us and trying to talk to us. Cat is quite a bit more feisty than me... and she wasn't shy about telling him off in several very colorful ways. I plainly told him that this was NOT the night to talk to us and he should seriously start walking the other way. He just laughed. I stopped Cat at the bicycle rack and told her we needed to double back and walk the other way for a while so we could try to lose this creep. So we did. It took us much longer to get home and the walk was a miserable one. We finally got home around 4am. I was in shock about this whole thing for the next two days....
Cat ended up doing some research and found out that prostitution is actually legal in Finland AND that the age for consensual sex is 16 years old. So it would seem that within the legislation of Finland... nothing that bad actually happened....
So,Yes... I think this stands as a good example of extreme culture shock...
Also, THIS story in particular may be one of the craziest things that has EVER happened to me. Don't say I didn't warn you before hand...
So Catherine (North Carolina) and I decided to run around town and check out a few more clubs. We couldn't resist visiting a bar named Redneck. We each got an apple cider and roamed around looking at all the "Redneck" things they were using for decorations. We were sitting and talking in the back when two girls sat at a table next to us. They soon were inviting us to sit with them and talk to them. Turns out, the talking part wasn't so easy. haha One of the girls spoke very little broken English, her friend... none at all. Cat and I don't speak Finnish either, so we had a good time TRYING to talk to one another. We found out that they were from a near by town and just visiting for the night. The girl who spoke a little English was only 17 and her friend was 18. They were both VERY drunk. (Legal drinking age is 18 in Finland) It seems to be the case that the bars here are overrun with creepy old drunk men and one of them found our table and decided he liked our new 17 year old friend. She was more than happy to take the drinks he was bringing her, but she quickly changed her mind once he started trying to seriously hit on her. Language barrier aside we got the hint that she wanted to be "saved" from this guy. So the four of us went outside for a smoke (only one person in the group was actually a smoker) Cat and I ended up... carrying... dragging..?? the 17 year old as best we could out of the bar and by the time we made it outside her friend and the old man.... WERE GONE. Yes.... this is were the weird stuff starts and actually all this is stretched out over SEVERAL hours.... So, Cat and I are confused and worried about what to do... We have just acquired a drunken 17 yr old and we are all three very worried about her missing friend. I go back in the bar to ask the bartender if she saw anything or knows anything. She tells us that they were talking about going to another bar downtown. So, we start walking and looking for this place. We find it eventually... and the 17yr old is so drunk they won't let her in. So I have to go inside and search this bar for her friend. Not an easy task to locate someone you've only just met an hour ago. No luck finding her. I get back outside and we ask the girl to try calling her friend.... "ring ring ring" oh.... the 17 yr old has her friend's phone!! sigh.... We go look in other bars as well and finally decide we are going to go get some food and water and try to sober this girl up. I finally have the idea to call my friend Juho who IS Finnish and see if he can translate / talk to her and see what's going on. We have no idea where her friend is, she doesn't live in Jyvaskyla, and we have no idea where to take her so that she can be safe. We find out that she is also in foster care so that ups the stakes EVEN more for calling the police. She's only 17 so she would automatically get in trouble for being drunk... We finally decide to try once more to look for her friend... THEN we would call the cops. We go back to Redneck to see if her friend came back or not, no she didn't. BUT THEN - she gets a phone call. Its the friend! She's back in their hotel room with all their other friends... and turns out... the hotel is DOWNTOWN. (This would have been nice to know about 3 hours ago) So great! Now we can deliver her to her friends and say gooooood niiight! It's not that easy.... Turns out... the drunken 17 year old can't remember WHERE the hotel is. A few more phone calls later, we get a name for the hotel at least.... but no address.... We finally found a random Finnish guy walking downtown and ask him for directions. The drunken 17 yr old is going on and on and on in Finnish to him. We have no clue what's going on now... He isn't from Jyvaskyla either but his friends are and they can meet us and show us where this place is. GREAT! We're making progress!! We told the guy thank you many times, he insisted no thanks was needed. On the way there... The girl pulls a beer out of her purse, and rips off the cap with her TEETH. She drank the beer quicker than we could take it away from her....We arrive at the front of a hotel... not the one we had the name for.... and now... It's me, Cat, drunk girl... and Three Finnish guys..... standing in front of a hotel.... I DON'T like this... I pull Cat aside and tell her this is bad news and we need to get away from these guys. She quickly agrees. However, convincing the drunk girl turned out to be MUCH more difficult. She has now decided she wants to go with these guys instead of staying with us... We try and try to tell her this isn't safe and that she should just let us help her. The guys are all just standing around we tell them to just walk away, they just laugh. We tell them she's only 17 years old and are told "So what, I'm 18". At this point she has her hands all over the guy that was helping us with directions and is she getting mad at us for trying to get her away from him. We finally pull her aside and try to talk to her. At this point, I see the directions guy getting money out of the ATM machine. Now I am putting more and more pieces of the puzzle together... and we beg her to get away from these guys.... this... this would be about the time she HIT ME. Yes.... She punched me in the chest. I was DONE with her after that. I threw my hands up, screamed a few obscenities and starting walking away. Cat was also really angry at this point. We had both gone out of our way, spent our entire night trying to help this girl... and then she acts this way?!? The more and more we talked about it and thought about the entire night... We start realizing that this girl and her friend.... were mostly likely prostitutes. This would explain why the friend suddenly disappeared with the older guy and really explains the fiasco at the end of the night. All through the night... she kept talking to every man she saw on the street... It was in Finnish of course, so we have no clue what as being said.. but looking back at the way they reacted..it all makes sense now. It was very difficult to deal with emotionally for me, I can't speak for Cat.... but I felt anger, sadness, confusion, embarrassment... I wanted to help this girl and I ended up feeling like she used us.
Cat and I were both very very angry as we started walking home and one of those old creepy men almost paid the price for it. He started following us and trying to talk to us. Cat is quite a bit more feisty than me... and she wasn't shy about telling him off in several very colorful ways. I plainly told him that this was NOT the night to talk to us and he should seriously start walking the other way. He just laughed. I stopped Cat at the bicycle rack and told her we needed to double back and walk the other way for a while so we could try to lose this creep. So we did. It took us much longer to get home and the walk was a miserable one. We finally got home around 4am. I was in shock about this whole thing for the next two days....
Cat ended up doing some research and found out that prostitution is actually legal in Finland AND that the age for consensual sex is 16 years old. So it would seem that within the legislation of Finland... nothing that bad actually happened....
So,Yes... I think this stands as a good example of extreme culture shock...