" Thanks to Karen Sato, Karen McLain, and Frank Langella for messages re: living in Finland. Our son lives and works in Finland. He has lived there continuously for the past 18 years and with his Finnish wife and son plans to remain in Finland. We have visited them five times over the years and find Finland a beautiful country as well as hospitable most of the time. We are considering retiring there, primarily to be close to our grandson, as well as his parents,(smile). It was our plan to spend a year there, as sort of a trial, before making a permanent move. We planned it from Dec,1,2000 to Dec,1,2001(because of the off season air rates). We knew you had to have visa to stay longer than 90 days, but unfortunately we learned too late that it takes 6 month to a year to get a visa (or a residence permit,as it is called in Finland) Now we are shooting for 2001 - 2002. To obtain the res permit you have two options; (1) through the Finnish Embassy or Consulate General of Finland here in the USA and (2) have our son apply for it at the local police dept. It sounds like some of you have found the police dept to be most helpful. Is that correct? P.S. We are not of Finnish descent. It would be easier if we were. We know the language to be difficult, but we want to learn if we can, even if we can get by with English, as so many Finns are fluent in several languages including English, and our 8 yr old grandson is fluent in both languages. I enjoy reading the expat news letter. Hope to hear from some of you again and we will keep you posted re: our experiences "

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" We too, are thinking of moving to Finland. We had no idea it would take so long to get a permit. What is required to get a permit? My husbands brother lives in Finland. Does that help when applying for a permit? I would appriciate more information. "

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" Hi there! I can only go from my experience, but it took me around 4 months the first time I applied in Australia for a residence permit for Finland. I applied on the basis of my Finnish partner (we are not married, but this did not seem to be too much of a problem). My second application in Australia took around 3 months to process. It seems to be easier to apply for a fixed period of say, 1 year. You can then renew it at the police station (in Helsinki it is the Dept of Aliens). Make sure though that you allow plenty of time for processing of your renewal. I have just had my permit renewed in Finland. The ""Dept of Aliens"" told me that it would take at least four months. I submitted a letter with my application asking them to process it faster as my permit was going to expire while I was out of the country. They were very helpful and did it in around 1 month. Friends of mine who do not have Finnish relatives of any description have found it much more difficult to have their permits renewed. I have had some Finnish lessons and am getting to the point that I can read things fairly well, and understand quite a bit of spoken Finnish. I am still working on speaking it myself though! It''s challenging, but all in all quite fun to learn. You can however manage most things in English without a problem. Email me if you have any other questions. Regards, Christina Phillips c_phillips@iname.com "

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Hello -- how are the Finnish lessons going? FYI, my father is English and my mother Finnish and he learned to speak Finnish quite well as an adult. It has its difficulties but the nice thing about it is that it is totally phonetic -- one letter, one sound, no exceptions. Makes reading, once you can speak a bit, much easier than in most languages.

Hope

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