As I sat down outside Bangkok airport to wait for the next bus into town, an elderly Thai woman looked up from her newspaper and asked me where I was from. I told her. "That's good," she said. She held up the newspaper and pointed at a headline. I was unsure how to respond, as the paper was in Thai. But then, in between the foreign words in the headline, I recognised the current numbers of the dead and injured in the London bombings. "I thought maybe you were from there," the lady said.

We chatted for a while, and it turned out that she had visited Norway once. I asked her what she thought. "So cold!" she said. "My friends told me it would be fine, but when I stepped off the plane I was SO COLD!". She had to go straight to a shop and buy a pair of gloves. "And they were SO EXPENSIVE!"

Cold and expensive. Norway in a nutshell. I asked her what time of year she had been there.

"This time of year," she said, with a sweeping gesture that took in the time of year.

"July?" I said.

"Yes, July."

We sat in silence for a while. I had a mental image of Karl Johan in July: Street artists. Hordes of Norwegian and Europan tourists in summer clothes. Ice-cream. A tiny, elderly Thai lady wearing gloves.

It turned out that my friend had been to Sweden as well. And Finland. I told her I had never been to Finland.

"Oh, it's the same as your country," she said, with a shrug.

I secretly doubted the veracity of this information about Finland.

"But we saw something there," she said, dreamily. "There was snow on the water. And people walked on it. And they made holes in it and caught fish."

"And this was on the same trip?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

"In July."

"Yes, in July."

Those poor Fins. No wonder they don't talk much.