‘He is our father!’ Unnop tells me of the incredibly popular Thai head-of-state. Unnop re-opened Pailin on Isokatu in January last year having bought the site from a Middle-Eastern kebab-shop owner.‘We still haven’t got round to changing everything!’ says Unnop.

The main awning still says ‘Isokadun Kebab’ but there’s a ‘Pailin’ sign in the window. The relatively small bistro offers a mix of the kind of fast-food that is particularly popular in Finland – pizza and kebabs – as well as Unnop’s own brand of Thai cuisine. 

Bistro

Unnop came to Finland in 1993. He’d been working as the representative of a Thai beer company for the previous thirteen years and they wanted to extend their market into Europe by opening up bistros and restaurants, ‘in Sweden and Germany for example,’ Unnop tells me, ‘and they told me to come and manage a restaurant in Helsinki.’
 
In 2004, Unnop came to Oulu to work in another Thai restaurant. But after half a year he decided to bring his brand of Thai cuisine to the city and opened ‘Pailin’ some way outside the city centre. Unnop specialises in the kind of ‘everyday, tasty’ snack food that can be bought on the streets of Bangkok, where he used to work. 
 
‘I wanted to open a bistro – rather than a restaurant – so that people can come in all the time,’ he tells me. ‘If they want to come in early in the morning and relax with a coffee or if they want to have lunch . . .’ However, he wanted a more central location and was eventually able to move his business to the heart of Oulu.

 ‘The Language!’

After having been here so long, there’s surprisingly little that Unnop really misses about Thailand these days.‘Not that much,’ he tells me. ‘I have internet and telephone to keep in touch with people . . . and my parents are both already dead. And my daughter is an adult now.’ Unnop also has a teenage son who comes into the bistro while I’m there.
           
But even though Unnop, who is fifty, doesn’t miss that much about Thailand anymore he has still found life in Finland to be very different.‘The language!’ he laughs. ‘Speaking and reading . . . it’s just not the same. So different from English!’ We do the interview in English, occasionally going into Finnish and sometimes Thai which Unnop’s son helpfully translates.
           
Unnop’s son tells me that his dad’s English is actually better than his Finnish but Unnop insists on always trying to be talkative to customers.
 
‘I always try to be friendly’

‘I always talk to people,’ he smiles. ‘I am a friendly person. Maybe some Finns are a little bit afraid to talk to foreigners but I always try to be friendly to all people.’ He tells me that sometimes when drunken locals come into his bistro on a Friday night without enough money he occasionally just ‘gives them food’ because ‘I am a friendly person.’
 
Unnop also thinks that some Finns seem to see ‘Asians’ as all being the same. ‘I don’t know,’ he ponders. ‘They look at us and they think maybe we are from Vietnam or something.’
           
But Unnop has also found Finland’s drinking culture to be very different from anything in Thailand and he still seems amazed when describing it to me. ‘They are drunk sometimes even in the street . . . so much that they are falling over! But they are very welcome here if they want food!’ he laughs while his son adds that in Thailand people ‘might get drunk but they would do it in the home.’

‘Every day there’s something different!’ 

When I ask him about the funniest thing that’s ever happened to him in Finland he laughs and tells me that ‘every day there’s something different!’ However, he struggles in English to describe how bizarre he has found seeing women who’ve had a bit too much to drink going to the loo in side streets in Oulu as this would be amazing in Thailand.
 
‘I see them one day in the side-street with trousers off and they . . . they . . . you know! In Thailand . . . lady never do this in public!’ he laughs.The main challenge that Unnop has come up against in Oulu, as he puts it, is ‘First we are Asian food . . . but now Finnish.’ He shows me the menu, which includes many different Thai dishes.