I didn't take any photos today, which is probably the first time this summer perhaps, so with the Olympics starting this week, todays image comes from outside the Notre Dame cathedral well before it burned a handful of years ago. My wife and I visited Paris over a decade ago, and we had a good time.
As normal for the Olympics though, there are lots of stories coming out about how terrible it is, with robberies and soldiers patrolling the streets, ruining the atmosphere. I find it interesting how people complain about security, until there is an event where they think security should have been better thought through.
It is a pity we live in a world of dicks.
But, that is not quite what my reflection is about today, but it kind of is as well.
A few weeks ago, I took Smallsteps to a park in the city where she made a random friend and instead of making it a one off, I swapped numbers with the parents to set up a playdate. Today, we met again, and I took my wife so that she could meet the parents too.
It didn't go that well.
It didn't go badly, but as I had warned my wife, the couple are from another country and therefore have a bit of a different way about them. They don't seem like bad people or anything like that, but they are somehow more open and also more closed off than Finnish parents. Their child speaks English as their mother tongue, but that is not the parent's main language, which isn't the issue, as after all, Smallsteps is dual mother tongue herself and half foreign.
I think that sometimes it is hard for Finns to connect with people who are not like them, as the culture here is generally pretty homogenous in the sense that most people have a similar experience growing up. Of course, there are wide variations, but there are also cultural standards in the way that for instance, 90% of a family's Christmas dinner is going to overlap with just about everyone else in Finland. There are "norms" and people can somewhat rely on them to engage with with strangers.
However, this family have lived in several quite different countries and haven't their norms aren't really the same as any of them, but rather an amalgamation of many pieces. This puts them into some kind of "uncanny valley" in their set of behaviors, which means that at times they seem friendly and at other times guarded, or even somewhat annoyed. It is a strange mix for sure, and I don't think my wife really knew how to handle the conflicts.
It was interesting to observe and participate in the interactions for a few hours, where there were awkward silences and uncomfortable moments where I think that both sets of parents would have seemed weird to each other. But, regardless of this, the girls seemed to have fun playing together, so that is all that really matters, isn't it?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]