roger_roger wrote:Thai, Somali, Malay or Kurd a foreigner is foreigner in Finland and there is different magnifying glass through which they are looked upon.007 wrote:Wow really roger? Is that your personal experience? Based on hearsays? I am not sure whether your post deals esp. with Thai or you had somalis or kurds in mind when you wrote that. i can agree to an extent that certain nationalities are seen through default glasses; however, it also seems like your post speaks about all those brown and black people married to Finns.
Everyone does that, I haven't yet met a person in this world who is not interested to know or learn about different cultures, food and people from different countries/continents, or share the knowledge of their culture, Finns are no exemptions, period.007 wrote:My own experience is that Finns are really curious about exotic cultures. They also love explaining Finnish cultures including foods, nature, weather, religions etc. to foreigners.
It'd be if you learn to know about it.007 wrote:No one knows what others think and feel towards in-laws foreigners but at least it's not so overtly visible.
when you are IN, you are already IN, exclusion happens before you are IN and you'd never even know you were not IN. There's a secret way to do it.007 wrote:I am an asian guy, been with my wife for nearly a decade and been to a number of family gatherings.....I have never experienced "apparant" social exclusion nor heard of others facing such exclusion.
I can give you an example of earlier this year, my son joined a new school and has a best friend (Ville) in his school he plays with most of the time, I have seen the kid who is normal kid of his age. Once while going to pick him up I received a letter in his box addressing Illari's Isan ja Aiti (Illari being my son's name). It was invitation letter to Ville's birthday and both parents were invited and to inform if we are coming. Next day I called them to inform only one parent is coming with Illari to the birthday. As I have 3 kids and if both parents go to birthday it doesn't make sense to leave small ones at home. At that point I came to know that Ville's parents were Finnish. Her mother with whom I talked came to know I was not Finnish although my son's name sounds like Finnish. Maybe they thought we were Finnish couple as the Kid's name is like Finnish.
After few days I received a text message from Ville's mother that she forgot the count of the people she was inviting and the party hall can only occupy such amount of people due to some Finnish rules. She was asking, if its okey to drop Illari to the birthday and pick him up after the birthday as Ville really would like to have Illari around his birthday. I had to do it just for my son or else they'd see the middle finger. I went to drop him and while going to pick him up the kids were playing so I had to get inside the room to pull him out. There were around 10-12 kids and 14 15 people all together in that big hall, even the sofas were half empty where I was told like there wouldn't be much standing space. I looked around and greeted everyone who came in front of me with moro or morjens and all of them were Finns. You'd not get trophy for guessing why we were the ones to be asked politely not to come.
I doubt we'd even be invited at first if my son's name was not Illari and they didn't know his last name, ha ha ha.
My point is that just being married to a foreigner does not automatically get you off the guess list contrary to what you seem to have claimed in your other post. Unless there's chemistry problems, I don't see it happening in most of the cases. Each to his own.
See I am from a country where we used to have a visible caste discrimination and I in fact underwent a great deal of discrimination (mostly perceived discrimination) in my locality because well... my family was an outsider to that community. Without going into details, I just say that we always had (I am sure my parents still have ) this grudge against our neighbors and people in that locality, and whenever a conflict be it a kids-related or any day-to-day stuffs like water distribution etc arose, we get this notion that we were being discriminated because we are of different caste. I've had enough of those paranoids now... so, my threshold for perceived discrimination is really high as a grown-up... that I don't pull racism or ethical discrimination cards whenever I am in unfair situation.
It's sad when people are excluded and discriminated because of their ethnic backgrounds/skin of colors etc. but I always give a benefit of doubts to others as long as it's not a blatant racism/ethnic discrimination. !"#¤% happens to everyone... just because I am a foreigner.. does not mean that whenever !"#¤% happens, it's because I am a foreigner.