Finland

Why it sticks

1. 1

   Finland has about 188,000 lakes and roughly 3 million saunas for 5.6 million people.

2. 2

   It was part of Sweden for about 600 years, then a Russian grand duchy, before independence in 1917.

3. 3

   Finnish is not Indo-European; it is a Uralic language related to Estonian and distantly to Hungarian.

• Long words with doubled letters and many ä and ö ("katu", "tie"); coastal areas have bilingual Finnish/Swedish signs.
• Yellow centre lines separate opposing traffic, with white edge lines.
• Warning signs are yellow with a red border.
• Licence plates have the EU strip with "FIN" and the format "ABC-123".
• Older Generation 3 imagery often shows a visible stitching "rift" in the sky.
• Endless pine and birch forest with lakes and red wooden houses.