Breaking Wind Lappish Style

A few years ago, while on a summer holiday in Lapland, I went on a one-day guided cycle tour in the countryside around the small "town" of Inari.

At lunchtime, we stopped at a small cafe in the town centre. To my surprise, we left the expensive mountain bikes outside the cafe, unlocked. Our guide, Ate, explained that no one locked anything in Lapland as theft was very rare. He then proceeded to tell us a hilarious story about the pitfalls leaving vehicles unlocked.

Finnish as a Secret Code

One of my former colleagues, Simo, is fond of saying (I suspect only half jokingly) that Finnish is the second best encryption language in the world. By that he means that Finnish is virtually undecipherable to anyone who doesn’t know it, and spoken by sufficiently few people globally to make it pretty secretive.