So, how did I end up as an Aussie living in Finland?

I grew up in the hot, sweaty suburbs of Brisbane and always had a fascination with the Nordics because my best friend in primary school, Hemmie, was half-Swedish. Her photos and stories of living in the Swedish countryside over summer always made me want to live overseas in the green landscapes dotted with cute red cabins.

As soon as I was able to, I started travelling as much as I could. I fit the Australian stereotype of being someone who made an effort to visit some of the most far-flung places in the world before I had explored much of my own country.

In 2006 I deferred university for a semester and travelled for four months, and ever since then, I have had a dream of living abroad.

My plans of moving to London a few years later were stalled thanks to the GFC, so I started my corporate career with the dream of moving internationally when the time was right. A few years later, I moved to Sydney, where I met my husband. Thankfully, he loves travel as much as I do. After we got married in 2016, we went on a 4-month-long honeymoon travelling to 30 countries across four different continents. One of the highlights for me was Helsinki. I became a full Finnophile. I followed people living in Finland, I read books about Finland, and I was always looking for jobs in Finland. Moving there felt like an impossible pipe dream. Now, I realise I was just manifesting the life I have now.

I spent the years after our honeymoon grinding away and climbing the corporate ladder and living a lovely beach lifestyle in Bondi Beach. Alongside my corporate career in design and innovation, I have had a “side-hustle” for many years as a freelance food & travel writer and a blogger (this blog was formerly Tales & Trails). I got paid to eat and stay at nice hotels, tough right?

Then I got pregnant, and life changed a lot, obviously. I had no energy or motivation and felt incredibly ill. In the depths of those long insomnia-fueled nights, I thought a lot about what I had and hadn’t done in my life yet. Although I wanted to be a parent, I also didn’t want to just be someone’s mum. There were still so many things I wanted to do and places I wanted to see. And I still hadn’t lived out my life-long dream of living abroad, so I started to look for jobs. What better time to plan an international move and uproot your entire life than when you’re pregnant?

So, we embarked on a “baby-moon”. Once my daughter was 3.5 months old, we packed up our stuff, rented out our apartment, and started to travel the world. First, to Malaysia, then the Middle East, Georgia, Italy, San Marino, Spain, and we “lived” in Portugal for 8 weeks. The travelling was exhausting, but also incredibly empowering. It made me realise I can do both - I can be a good, present and loving parent AND still focus on my dreams. I was always under the impression they were mutually exclusive.

Planning my move abroad became my hyper fixation. I knew I wanted to shift my career into aviation because I loved travel so much. I landed an amazing job at Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi. I thought the Middle East was one of my only options, as only speaking English wasn’t a barrier. But while my visas were being processed, something about the move wasn’t sitting right with me. I wasn’t as excited as I should have been, given how badly I wanted a job at an airline and to move abroad.

During a long night of nursing, I looked at my LinkedIn app and came across a post “Lead Designer - Innovation at Finnair”, I excitedly opened the job ad and down at the bottom I read the magic words “this job requires fluency in English as it is our operating language” - BINGO!

The rest is history. We went back to Australia and repacked our lives. We had packed for the dessert, and now we needed to pack for the snow. We left Australia on January 7 2019, when it was 40 degrees, and landed in Helsinki, where it was -16.

We spent 4 wonderful years in Helsinki learning the culture, making friends, and even buying our very own cabin in Raasapori. I also had my son in 2020, he is my favourite Finnish souvenir. During that time, my husband was working evenings in America, and it meant no one was sleeping well. So we collectively made the decision to move to Cambridge, MA, USA in 2023. Although I made some wonderful friends and got to work for IDEO, a company I have always admired, something about living in America didn’t suit us. I missed Finland deeply.

My husband was ready to embark on a new entrepreneurial endeavor and thought it would be worth a shot to apply for a Finnish start-up visa. It was a long shot. But one that paid off. So, after 1.5 years in America, we packed up our life (again) and moved back to Finland in June 2024. Now we are happily living here again.

During all these moves, I have been asked so many times, “Why would you want to move to Finland?” and not a single person asked me that about America. To me, this is crazy. Why wouldn’t I want to live in Finland? Nowhere is perfect, but to me, it is as close to utopia as you can get. So, I thought I would start to share my reasons why, so I started posting videos about why I love Finland so much.

All my posts, on this platform and my social media, are in the hope that you can enjoy Finland and adventuring with your family as much as I do.