The portions of Finland shown on this weeks Amazing Race did little to encourage me to ever visit there.

What should the Race have been showing?

Keith

What are your interests? museums? food? fine dining? reindeer riding? fish drying classes? pine cone gilding?

snowball making?

"What should the Race have been showing?"

The Finnish line, of course.

LOL, P_M!

Keith

In Moscow they had the racers clean buses (or was it trams?).

They certainly don't always do much to promote tourism.

"What should the Race have been showing?"

Lets see.

They should have had to do some old style reindeer biting. That is when herders bite male reindeers testicles away with their teeth.

And since they are Americans and shy with nudity, they should have gone to a public sauna where clothes and towels are forbidden, and temperature nears boiling point. Then they should have jumped to a hole in the ice. Oh, sorry, it was summer. No ice.

They should have participated a bear hunt in some city center. Last week there was one in Hämeenlinna in southern Finland. A couple of years ago there was one 15 kilometres from Helsinki´s center.

Along those lines.

As someone who has lived in Finland for six years, watching this leg of Amazing Race really disappointed me.

Yes, Keith, there is a lot more to Finland than what they showed us, and it reminds me what I don't like about AR: it really is little more than one big race. I wish they included just a bit more about the cultures and customs of the places they visited. All they said about Helsinki, for instance, was that it's a "bustling metropolis". Big deal. Would it be so hard for them to throw in little factoids here and there? I don't mean to imply a travelogue or extensive history of the country, but just a little informational tidbit here and there. As I was watching, I kept thinking that the Finns probably agreed to participate because they wanted Americans to learn more about their beautiful, relatively unspoilt country, but what did we see? That Finland is a mud wrestler's mecca? That it has an Olympic stadium? The fact that it has limestone mines is potentially interesting, but again, there was no information given beyond the fact that it was there. And what happened to one of the other destinations - Turku, the country's former capital, a quaint, old city dating from the 1200s?

Ah well, I guess I should know better than to expect anything even slightly informative from a "reality show".

The Finnish line - that's cute! Thanks for being punny, P_M. You made me smile.

How can you possibly expect to learn anything about a country from a crap programme like "Amazing Race"....!!!