Where are you from?

Practically every day people ask me this question. Sometimes several times a day. Apparently I sound funny. No longer British, but just funny. It's my vowels they say. So I’ve given up. I will never have a “perfect” American accent (then we can discuss which part of the U.S. speaks that “perfect” accent). I don’t think I can find a place, where everyone would speak in the exact same dialect, or where I would be the only foreigner. Here I find myself mostly affected by British, German and Swedish accents. So I have now decided to accept the fact (quoting several sources from the English department ;) that each person has their own idiolect blah blah blah.

So, when I tell people where I’m from, I generally get two types of response. Others get all excited. Then they either tell me: “Oh, cool, I have a sister/brother/cousin in [insert any Scandinavian city]!” (“Well, that’s nice. It’s a different country, you know”) or: “Cool! I have this Finnish friend “Samsa” (intonation so that you should react: “Oh, Samsa, he’s like my best friend”), he’s like the coolest person I’ve ever met”. Well, apparently there was an exchange student called Sampsa here and he seemed to have known a lot of people because seriously very many people have mentioned him!

The other group is also very excited but have obviously no clue whether Finland is a state, town, an independent country…

If the conversation goes on (usually not if the second group is in question), next they’ll ask me, why I came to Moscow, Idaho. For some reason (and I’ve noticed this before) people seem to think that their particular small hometown is so much more boring than any other small town in America. Personally, I don’t think it makes much of a difference whether I’m in Idaho, Arizona or California. Larger cities are too far away if you don’t have a car, services are the same everywhere (like 20 times better than in an equally sized Finnish city!)…

And yes, it gets cold in Finland, at least by your standards, but I’m really quite comfortable with it. And yeah, seriously, over there we wear more clothes outdoors than indoors and for me regular room temperature is not 17 degrees Celsius.