After a promotion for a ‘Finnish Dinner Date’ went ‘a bit viral’, the Canberra envoy’s next post became an unlikely social media hit
Get our daily political email, free app or daily news podcast
The embassy of Finland in Canberra was temporarily closed on Tuesday, 10 November.
Millions of people across the world were, it turns out, quite upset by this.
A day later, with the flourish of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the embassy reopened its doors – having garnered many millions of views on its videos, spurred memes seen by millions more and social media attention across the globe, all unexpectedly from an innocuous Instagram post about a staff training day.
“We were all having a nice planning day, then someone said ‘oh my goodness it’s gone completely viral’,” Arto Haapea, Finland’s ambassador to Australia, told Guardian Australia.
The Finnish embassy, nestled in leafy Yarralumla in Canberra’s diplomatic zone just a stone’s throw from Parliament House, isn’t exactly a tourist hotspot in the nation’s capital. Flanked by the embassies of Estonia, Singapore, Mexico and Samoa, the sleek building – all grey panelling and glass – looks more like a bank or an office block than the genesis of a bizarre social media sensation stretching from Europe and the United States to the centre of Australian politics.
