More Finnish than the Finnish themselves?

My philosophy on living here has been to try to integrate myself into the culture and language, without losing a sense of who I am - you could say that our whole family has been doing this since our arrival in Ireland 26 years ago, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's going too well. I was eating in our student rest, which is shared with the city's orchestra (and I just tried to spell orchestra, orkesteri, niin kuin suomeksi ie. as in Finnish) and chatting with some of my school friends, when some of the orchestra sat down next to us. After a while one of them said with a very strong south-east English accent: 'excuse me, are you English?' I replied: 'yes', and he continued: 'Oh! I thought you were Finnish'. It turned out that he is one of the cellists in the Orchestra, originally from Kent. He has been here for 20 years, so maybe his fellow English/Irish spotting techniques were a little rusty. Then yesterday a new student in one of my theory classes came up after the class and asked why I sometimes spoke English in the class, and I told her that I was from England. She looked extremely perplexed as if to say 'what?'. One may grant her that she isn't the brightest light in the house, but still, a reasonably fundamental mistake, given that my hair isn't blond and I have a decidedly unfinnish nose, to say nothing for the rest of my face. It does prove for me that, as I suspected, language is a very important part of the culture, and if you have that mastered, then you're a long way towards cultural understanding. I, on the other hand, still have a long way to go of my own. Still haven't dreamed in Finnish, though, but I now think (and sometimes count in my head) in Finnish. Swearwords, hmm, yes, got some of those too, but like all good reserves, because I have them I haven't really needed to use them. The English ones still get an outing in private, and I can use those so forcefully I don't need any substitutes!