What city is that? 
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
If you want to find a lot of Finns in the USA, visit the other side of the lake from TBay: the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
BTW, the gawd-awful food is more than made up for by the sauna culture – one of the things that makes winter wonderful.
Pulla. Cardamom braid. I’m half Finn on both sides and grew up being able to get pulla easily. I can’t find it in Vancouver. So I made it, and made my Dad very happy. Also Lanttulaatikko aka baked turnip casserole.
Finns are big on carbs. Sweets, bread, root vegetables, and coffee. Lots of saunas.
It’s how one survives that far north.
I was born and raised in Thunder Bay, and as Muffin said, we have the largest Finnish popluation outside of Finland. Both my grandmothers were born to Finnish immigrants, and neither of them spoke English until they started school. Dad was raised in his grandmother’s house. He ate a lot of rye bread growing up.
My ex husband’s family is Danish. Many of the traditions are similar and I am learning some Danish recipes that are very similar to Finn ones.
But pulla is Finn.
OK, I’ll admit it. A lot of Finnish baked goods are really good. 
Google indicates probably Toronto (14,750 Finns out of 2.16 million total).
However, Thunder Bay, with only 108k people has 14,510 Finns. That is probably why they can’t get any more people to move to Thunder Bay, not even other Finns.
No wonder. I mean, if this thread is any indication, Finns are real dicks.
Never mind. Repeat of something I already said. :smack:
Oops- I take this back in the case of Muffin (whose posts I overlooked) and her grandmothers.
It helps that she has Danish blood-- my father was Danish. He said that Finnish women were great beauties even compared to other Scandinavians. Also, a girlfriend of mine who had traveled to Finland said that in general the people there were the best looking she had ever seen.
Yes, but it’s politely passive-aggressive. That’s the great thing about Miss Manners. She tells you how to put rude people in their place without being rude yourself.
No worries. Although I live surrounded by a lot of Finns, am truly addicted to saunas, and have even come across reindeer a couple of times, I am not Finnish. My great greats etc. were from Bo-Peep.
I’ve always kind of scratched my head about how everyone hates America and yet so many people seem keen to live here.
It’s possible to like something yet want it to be better.
True, but Tripolar has a point; there does seem to be a certain “fashion” among a lot of Euro expats to bash the shit out of US stuff like foods, etc… and yet take advantage of the rest that the country offers with absurd gusto.
It’s almost like there’s a little bit of guilt/regret for leaving their homeland and moving to the US, so they feel like they have to play up the homeland and bitch about their adopted home to atone for it.
And, at least in my experience, most of the bitching is more along the “I grew up with Country X-style <product>, and the US version is in a different style, so it sucks.” line, or along the lines of “I come from a country that’s geographically the size of Maryland, and roughly the population of Illinois, but I’m going to bitch that the groceries in semi-rural Kansas isn’t quite as fresh or awesome as I had in the Netherlands.”
But these guys sure seem to love living in the US otherwise.
The problem with that is that there are increasingly more people who find passive aggressiveness itself to be rude. And I’ve seen time after time where it inspires passive aggressiveness back, to the point that all they do is trade barbs. And then I’ve seen the opposite, where they wind up completely oblivious, and then everyone is mad at them.
I for one prefer polite assertiveness. I’m okay with hints, as long as you remember to get more direct if hints don’t work. But that doesn’t mean you have to be passive aggressive. No need for hidden barbs.
Have you tried singing the Monty Python song whenever she starts up? “Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I quite want to beeeee…”? Extra points if you learn to sing it in Arabic.
Or sing her your version of “Moon River”:
We’re after that same rainbow’s end, waitin’ 'round the bend
My hypocritical Finnish friend, moon river, and me
I have always found it far more effective to resist telling someone they are being hypocritical and instead point out that what they are saying sounds incredibly hypocritical.
It somehow makes them more willing to refect and sometimes even admit, “Yeah, I can kinda see what you mean.” Not always, of course. But often.
Just a suggestion.
No, its because bad food in the us is worse than bad food in europe.
For what it’s worth, I agree entirely with your Finnish friend.
On second thoughts its partly the discombobulation of the expat.
In your own country you easily pigeonhole bad or weird products: “garbage only winos drink” ; “for weird old people with no taste buds left”; “tourist trap clip joint” etc while abroad you just goggle and wonder “Normal People buy this shit?!”