[ Aug.2015 ] We stayed in Helsinki, in Finland, for only three days on the weekend and within those days, we received help from unknown passers-by twice!
When a person with a camera stands and opens a map, they are obviously a lost tourist.
In the past, even in London, people help tourists, too, but nowadays in big cities people are generally too busy to care about others.
Or they think “what if the person looking lost is a bad person…?”
So people ignore those lost tourists.
In Finland, maybe because the immigration issue is not too serious,yet, people were kind to foreigners.
On the other hand, people in Finland are not flexible.
We used Finnair this time and, recently, they started charging for check-in luggage for economy class passengers.
If you pay beforehand online, it is cheaper, but because their system was not properly ready when I tried to pay, it did not work.
On the way, at the airport in London, they accepted the online price as it was their fault, but on the way back at the Finnish airport, the person at the counter never accepted it.
This incident reminded me of another issue I had in a Finnish airport a long time ago.
There was three of us and the combined weight of our luggage was within the limit, but one of them was over, so we had to rearrange our luggage at the airport.
I must not generalise easily, but for me Finnish people are very humane at heart but when it comes to the rules, they become a machine.
