Jenna in Finland

If I can give you one piece of advice as a foreign person moving to Finland, you need to drop your home country’s standards about punctuality (i.e. the art of timeliness and being on time). There is no “African/Spanish/Mediterranean/Arab/South American/whereever-else-you’re-from-people’s time” in this country. When someone says be there at 11:00, you need to be strolling up at 10:55 and ready to go. To quote South Park, if you’re not doing that, then you’re gonna have a bad time.

When I lived in Andorra, I had a buddy from Zambia who was always 30-45 minutes late to everything. It really pulped my orange the first few times, until she was like “hey – I’m on African time [yes this is a thing], I’m always late. Just get started without me!” and after that I didn’t care and still don’t. That lesson taught me a lot about cultural expectations of timeliness and also about learning to just chill out and realize that other people’s punctuality (and lack thereof) is neither my responsbility nor my problem.

But now I’m in Finland. Timeliness is important, especially so if you want to make actual friends with the locals here. Or if you want to keep a job, or make sure a teacher at school doesn’t put you on blast in front of the entire class because you’re late.

How to Stop Being Late

If you aren’t used to timeliness, then the best advice I can give you is add 10-20 minutes to your start time. So if you need to be somewhere at 12:30, and google is telling you that it’ll take 15 minutes to get there, then add 10 minutes if you live a more suburban/rural (therefore you’d be driving) area, or if you’re in a city and will be taking public transport, add 20 minutes. Please trust me on this one. I live in the capital region and it took me a solid 2 years to stop being friggin’ late all the time.

If you have made the effort to be timely but some nonsense cropped up, like a flat tire or a late bus, then make sure to inform the person of your lateness and apologize. They’ll likely be fine with it (unless it becomes a habit) and you can move on with your day.

TL;DR: if you wanna integrate into Finnish society, the first step is don’t be late. Things start promptly, so get there at the appointed time!