Heart and Groin Transplants

Living in Finland does funny things to you. Or at least funny things to foreigners, expats, etc...

I was asked over the weekend, is it any different to an expat community elsewhere in the world. Yes because some places have single foreigners (Dubai, Hong Kong), some are very family focussed (army camps, diplomat kids, international schools, missionaries) but Finland has love or Nokia.

Love or Nokia account for 97 percent of the reason foreigners are here - a Finnish lover, usually female (also known as Hot Blonde Syndrome) or a job with a company that hires foreigners, usually Nokia.

So there are a lot of couples, a lot of early marriages, a lot of unemployed or underemployed blokes and a lot of alcohol. An AA worker and a counseller would have a field day. We pour our problems to the bar tender, unless he has problems.

So anyway where was the title of this post going... oh somewhere completely different. I seem to have met a lot of men with heart transplants or personality disorders here (lets forget for a moment I worked in mental health and I am allowed to be un-PC!). Why do I keep meeting married men? Married men who are unhappy? Married men who like you and then don't? Married men who like you, don't, do get scared etc. Or there are guys who just aren't sure. Indecisive men.

Anyway, I'm rambling but I've realised in the expat Aussie community, I am smurfette. There are a lot of blokes out there, and I'm the only woman. Poor smurfette. She must have days when she loved them, needed them, but boy she wanted to kill them...