Comment by hellojesus
1 year ago
Thank you for the insight. It's really interesting to see the Euro perspective. Moreso considering how I would believe immigration is more common after the establishment of the EU. But I suppose you do have relatively recent major conflicts which may cause resistance to outsiders.
As an aside, I once was considering trying to spend some working years in Scandinavia but read that it was likely I would always be kept at an arm's length by the locals since I was non native, regardless of my fluency in the language. As an American, I found it odd considering how heterogenous my social circle was. Maybe totally false or not applicable to urban centers, but I read it from various sources, and it was persuasive enough for me to switch focus to mainland Europe.
For Scandinavia and the rest of the Nordics natives get kept at arms length too. Not going to play down the presence of xenophobia as well, but really the Nordic countries can seem very cold on the surface because nobody let you get close until there is a socially sanctioned reason to.
To the point there are books about how to befriend us [1]. There's also this meme[2] of Finns always spacing out at bus stops to avoid invading each other's personal space, for example, but while Finland is perhaps on one extreme of that, Scandinavia as well is close. Denmark maybe a little bit less and in Norway and Sweden.
The way around that tends to be shared activities. E.g. joining a class, going out with colleagues, or joining various groups, or getting drunk, where you then have a socially sanctioned reason for talking to people, and people build from that. People who are used to being able to start friendships with just random encounters will often find that frustrating and hard to navigate and wonder why they're blanked or ignored or actively rebuffed when trying to be friendly - it's not you, or where you're from (most of the time), it's that talking to a stranger makes a lot of people instantly wonder what fresh hell this is. It's not that random encounters etc. never lead anywhere in Scandinavia, but it's rarer. If you move to any of the Nordic countries and don't know or pick on that you will have a bad time. Unless you're a massive introvert - then it's awesome.
For someone who is used to expecting American levels of just randomly talking to people (having been on the receiving ends of that many times when visiting the US: I could never get used to that...), getting used to that might be hard, and basically the further South you go in Europe the less you deal with that.
[1] https://www.thesocialguidebook.no/blogs/norwegian-culture I bought the first one of this guys books as a joke for my non-Norwegian girlfriend, and it gets things mostly right, I think.
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/1494mm/how_to_wait...
Really great info. Thank you!