Mathias turns to karaoke
Before Mathias reads the task brief, Mark asks if he’s ever been to Finland. Mathias says he has not, but that he “loves booze and knives”.
He demonstrates to Mark that any Finnish he may be able to speak is thanks to his habit of reading the labels on the backs of toiletry bottles (on which warnings and such are written in several languages) when he is in the bathroom, by reading the back of a bottle of hand lotion.
Mathias enters the lab with full arms, carrying a bowl of water, the bottle of lotion, the Finnish-Danish dictionary, and the task brief. As he enters, he hums the ending theme to the 1990s Moomins cartoon, and Kustaa joins in (the Moomins were created by a Swedish-speaking Finnish writer and illustrator, Tove Jansson).
Mathias then sits down and reads the Finnish text off of the back of the hand lotion bottle to Kustaa, before giving him a hand massage. At no point during the massage does Mathias attempt to speak Finnish, instead holding his end of the conversation in Danish.
He muses that sometimes it’s nice to just exist together with a person without feeling the need to talk. He then leaves the room and returns with the globe bar, pouring a drink for each of them.
Mathias then suddenly gets another idea, and leaves the lab again, soon returning with a microphone, and singing the opening lines of Dolly Parton and Kenny Loggins’ Islands in the Stream. When Kustaa indicates that he doesn’t know the song, Mathias starts singing the Danish lyrics to the Moomins ending theme, and Kustaa fills in with the “Hey, Moomins!” at the end of each line. He then turns the microphone over to Kustaa, who sings a line from the ending theme in Finnish (“Karkeloi kansa ja kunnailla soi” – ‘the people are having fun and the hills are singing’). Mathias then follows up with some nonsense Finnish, which makes Kustaa laugh (possibly because Mathias unintentionally says the real Finnisg word “voi” at the end, which has several meanings, but likely translates to Kustaa as ‘butter’ in this context).
Lasse awards Mathias second place.
(Written by Jenny R and proofread by Karl Craven)
(Illustrations collected by Jenny R and adjusted by David Fuller)
