You know them when you see them, no matter where you are. For some reason they pop out of the masses just by their appearance, and a trained eye can spot the signs from far away.

As I am writing this in the airport, I would hope I was talking about terrorists. Unfortunately that is not the case: instead, I immediately got the familiar hunch when I saw two women talking in front of the gate, and only a minute later I could confirm that I was right. I can recognize a bunch of languages when I hear them, but this one is definitely the strongest one.

Of course, they started chatting in Finnish.

It would be way too easy to spot two Finns in a crowd of Indian people, but that was not the case. I encountered several caucasians, men and women, tall and short, but only these two drew my attention in the first place. Most of the others I could identify as non-Finns because of their languages, passports, behaviour or other aspects. None of that came to me as a surprise, since the hunch was also missing.

It might be that I am just overoptimistic about my ability to spot Finns, but the success rate still seems to be high. I don’t know what the distinguishing features of a Finn are, but I still believe there are some.

Only one hour from now and I will be soaring towards the skies over Indian soil. All has gone well so far, I have my boarding pass, a stomach full of lunch and I’m through all the formalities. Now I’ll just wait and see where the plane will take me to.

Tags: people in india, travel