Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

When I book a dentist or an oral hygienist, the first available times are usually at miminum 8 months ahead. The cost is 60 €. This is at the public healthcare.

Granted, this is another Finnish city, not Helsinki.

I would add to this, if you are software engineer in SV and can work remotely with your current company (and keep making SV money or close) - Helsinki is absolutely worth thinking about if you think you would enjoy a Nordic lifestyle!

Great startup/tech scene, close to nature, Finns are fun to hang out with.

Best experienced during the summer, but the 90 day relocation "trial" with everything organised sounds pretty good now too.

> one of the weaker health care systems

Definitely not worldwide, maybe not even over whole Europe. I said of several European countries that I have experience of. That's a huge difference.

Remember the old saying: Don't believe any statics that you have not manipulated yourself.

Fact is that even OECD statistics about Finland is made by Finns. And Finns take a lot of pride in having their country look well internationally. The whole 90 day program is such a sign. Systematic doping in skiing happened over decades. After a big scandal in 2001 when it became public results have been much more mixed.

Normally these good international rankings are celebrated by the press. When the first World Happiness Report win came 2 or 3 years ago, for the first time the reactions were mixed: Local social research could not really find any explanation. Happiness is certainly not noted in the country on a regular basis.

My daugther, grown up in Finland, showed me the explanation posted on her social media channels: All those who are not happy are driven into suicide and no longer count.

While I don't say that that's the truth, there is a background to the cynicism: Suicide rates in Finland are 50% [1] higher than in Sweden, which is pretty close. Some say a neighbor country, but that might exaggerated because there is a sea in between.

Remember Nokia being the world leader in mobile phones? Less than a decade later they were out of business. All the time they were hiring those best engineers in the world...

I am far from claiming that everything is bad in Finland. But I have learned that these international comparison studies have to be taken with extreme caution. They report things that you don't necessarily see in your daily life, when you see people just not getting that doctor appointment.

Edit:

[1] That figure is either 20 years old or covers just young adult males. I cannot find fresh reliable figures now. But there has always been significant difference. OECD wrote: "Suicide rates in Finland fell by 25.8% from 2000 to 2011 compared to the OECD average reduction of 7% over the same period, and are still falling. Despite this impressive fall, Finland’s suicide ratesremain one of the highest in the OECD."

It's a nice cheeky smart thing to do by the Finns. I lived in Helsinki between 2005 and 2009. Overall, it's a great place to be and if you are tempted to give it a try, I'd say go for it. However, there are a few caveats:

Four seasons is a joke. It's basically 50 shades of winter and autumn interrupted by about 3-4 months of weather worth enjoying outside. It can get warm and humid but typically not for very long.

July and August are reliably nice mostly and you get basically ~20 hours of daylight around that time. June you can get lucky, anything else is an outlier. E.g. labor day celebrations (first of May) are a bit of a toss up on whether it will be nice enough or whether you still get snow. Mostly people just go outside anyway. But early spring kind of weather is the most generous thing you could say about the weather around that time: mostly not great but you get a few nice days once in a while.

The weather is one thing; the darkness is another. The two combined make for a miserable season that pretty much lasts from September to April. On the tail end of that is where you can expect winter conditions but these days even that is not a guarantee in Helsinki. The last few winters have been very mild; which in Helsinki means it is dark, wet, and grey for 8 months. If there is any Snow, you'll hate it by April because it will have been melting and freezing up non stop since February. Most Finns don't wear their outdoor shoes indoors for this reason.

Not everybody deals with darkness easily. I never had much issues with it but I definitely saw this affect others around me. Calling Finland the happiest place on earth deserves calling out its relatively high suicide rate (though a bit lower than the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...). There are "happier" places in Europe with arguably a lot more economic baggage to justify higher suicide rates. It can be a happy place and it definitely was for me but not everyone is happy.

Otherwise good to know is that if you are used to the byzantine bureaucracies of e.g. the US, Germany, etc. Finland is going to be a refreshing change. There's not a lot of it and what little there is is simple, efficient, and fair. Moving in and out of Finland were by far the easiest moves I've done (including domestic ones in the Netherlands, my home country). Basically, you enter the country, report to the police and then you are issued a person number and a Kela card which provides you access to things like healthcare and other things run by the government. That's pretty much it. Moving out amounted to a couple of phone calls to update my address.

All, in English, of course, because nobody is expected to even be capable to learn enough Finnish and if anything Finns are super pragmatic when it comes to these things. I never had a need for Finnish interpreters to do anything. Even when officially it's not supported, you can always find English translations for e.g. tax forms and extensive documentation. I did my taxes using the Swedish forms (second official language, a bit easier to parse) and those translations without an accountant. In Germany where I currently live, I'm completely helpless without an accountant even though I can read German quite well.

Quality of life is high. The VAT is high. The taxes actually aren't that high. If you are coming from e.g. California and add up all the little state, federal, council, and other taxes, it's ballpark going to be not very pretty (or so I'm told by friends who spent time there). Add healthcare to the mix and it gets brutal and that's before you take care of your pension (if at all). Finland sort of aggregates all of that and does not charge you separately for those things. If you do the math, it's not a bad deal for most people. You can get better deals elsewhere in Europe but a comparable lifestyle requires 5 figure salaries in the US because stuff just is universally expensive there.

I'm a non-native Finnish speaker. I learned the language in my teens.

It's not a difficult language, at all. It is actually surprisingly simple. The problem is the obscurity - there is very little interest in Finnish as a second language, and the teaching community for it is small and hasn't developed the kind of resources that imperial languages that were taught to countless millions of people during the age of empires (English, Spanish, French) have available. There's just not been a long enough history of teaching Finnish to adults and the resources are poor. My recommendations if you want to learn it:

a) constant low-level exposure to local media - local television has foreign-language films in original language with subtitles - this is super useful as a way to pick up new vocabulary you don't encounter in your everyday life, such as "get to the chopper" :P

b) this is controversial but I think the standard language model used by linguists is too strongly inspired by Latin and a very poor fit for Finnish. I find trying to learn grammar formally is counterproductive and will set you back. Instead, think of the noun suffixes as a preposition equivalent. Trying to think of them as cases will mess with your progress

c) hang around people having conversations and listen. Don't try to understand, just get comfortable with the sound of it. One of the more difficult things with agglutinative languages (languages that stick things together, very roughly speaking) is parsing out bits of words. Early on I'd sit on buses a lot and eavesdrop on random conversations just to get comfortable with the language.

d) Language courses are a poor path to fluency. I know people who spent a decade and a half on language courses and were unable to effectively communicate. If you are in a language course, try to counter its effects by at least equivalent-time exposure to random conversation

e) Music is a great in - it's way easier to remember complete phrases as song lyrics than standalone, and you can listen to an album a few times and then try dissecting a particular song's lyrics to figure out what it's all about.

f) Your primary bottleneck as a beginner is vocabulary - ignore grammar at first, just collect as much vocab as possible. The grammar is so simple and structurally regular that you'll pick up most of it from context, but that only works if you know what the hell people are talking about. Collect words everywhere you can. Read comics, read newspapers. Read medication warning labels. Read user manuals. The latter two are especially useful because they're parallel text so you have the translations right there. Don't try to keep score of how many words you know, keep score on how many word roots you recognize on an average day.

g) Try transcribing things you hear. youtube-dl a news broadcast, play it at 0.75x speed and write it all down, pausing the video if necessary. Don't bother trying to comprehend everything, just write it all down.

h) Use Finnish in boring everyday stuff - supermarket checkout, for example. This is easy low-level stuff and you'll get functional at that level very quickly. Do this way before you feel comfortable. This will give you daily active low-level practice. Use Finnish for all interactions where it doesn't have severe consequences if you're misunderstood.

i) Use media targeted at children. Story books are a great way to get lots of simple vocab in, and also a bit of culture. Go to the library, pick up a bunch of books targeted at 6-12 year olds, read them all. Repeat.

j) It may appear superficially that all the vocabulary is weird and foreign but a whole lot of it is borrowed, just borrowed a long way back. Not so useful early on but you pick up some patterns eventually. A number of phrases are word for word translations from other languages - for example "elintarvike" (food products, groceries) is a word for word translation of German "Lebensmittel". Learning German after Finnish I found a lot of familiar phrases. Going further back, you see a ton of germanic roots in everyday words like "tuoli" (chair). It's not obvious at first until you look at the Estonian version "tool", which is an earlier form of the same word. That is of course an abbreviated version of "stool"/"Stuhl" which is clearly germanic. Again, this won't help you learn new vocabulary but it may help with the feeling of "what the fuck how do they come up with this shit" that you get on first exposure to a new language group.

Expect 18-20 months before you can make sense of most things your colleagues say. Going from there to fluent communication depends entirely on how much you actively use it. It's not hard, it's just that nobody has had a century or two of experience teaching it to adults, so you have to figure out ways of making it work for you. Have faith in yourself. Once you break through the initial "this is so weird" barrier, progress is quick and very rewarding.