Sunday, February 3, 2008

Finnish summer is short, but there is not much snow!


This is my childhood's home in June 1999. As you can see, summer has already arrived! The green birches in the backyard reflect the mentality in Lapland: they have a strong vitality even in the middle of snow!

For this kind of situation there is a neat proverb: "Finnish summer is short but fortunately there is not much snow!". And the same in Finnish language: "Suomen kesä on lyhyt mutta vähäluminen!".*

*For a help to the pronunciation of the Finnish language, you may want to know that the language follows pretty closely the International Phonetic Alphabet, see [æ] for ä.