FADE IN.

EXT. A small yellow car is driving on a long city street. On one side of the street, there is a river, on the other, some small houses.

INT. Zooming in, we see two young men inside the car.

» Continued

On my first day of work in Sweden, 13 years, 6 months, and 22 days ago, I took the subway from my apartment, a place that a friend of a new colleague let me use for a couple of weeks while I was looking for a place of my own, and I headed downtown.

I had only lived in Stockholm for five days, and had mostly just walked around the neighbourhood – and accumulated parking tickets right outside my apartment building.

I got on the red subway line towards downtown, and sat down reading a book, like a real Stockholmer. And then, as the subway train got closer to the Old Town where the office was, I … well, I panicked. I got off at a stop that was just before the Old Town, foolishly thinking that it would be faster to walk from there than to walk from the actual Old Town stop.

» Continued

In April 1917, when the Russian Bolshevik leader Lenin traveled through Stockholm, the Swedish Communists Ture Nerman and Fredrik Ström took their comrade to PUB where they bought him a new suit so he would look good coming back to Russia.
– Wikipedia

Hundreds of thousands of Finns travel to Stockholm each year, most of them on one of the two ferry lines that have their ships go back and forth the two capitals - Helsinki and Stockholm - and one former capital - Turku, Finland.

» Continued

In my first year of college, I spent most of the weekends at my Grandma’s little place a half hour north of Helsinki. Well, I actually drove up and spent most of the weekends with my cousins, my uncle’s kids, who shared their yard with Grandma and Grandpa.

They were - are - just a couple of years younger, so e had a lot of fun doing stuff that Grandma and Grandpa probably wouldn’t have wanted to do. I say “probably” because we never asked them if they wanted to come out and go ice skating on the gravel road in the winter, or watch MTV or old TV shows on VHS, or drive up to the sports field and kick a soccer ball with us.

And when it was time to go to bed, we didn’t ask them if they, too, wanted to lie in the dark, listen to music, and crack silly jokes – but then again, by then, they had been asleep for five, six hours.

» Continued

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I happened to be in the audience when three Finnish NHL players held a press conference about their game later that week in Helsinki, Finland. The Anaheim Ducks players were on the podium, in their impressive looking suits that they’re required to wear as stipulated in the Exhibit 14, Paragraph 5 of the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ association.

While listening to them, I happened to notice that two of them were wearing very impressive looking watches on their arms.

» Continued

I can see the McDonald’s golden arches on a rooftop on the other side of the bay from my hotel room. I can also see the big white cathedral, the national museum, and the Hesperia park and the trees around it turning red and yellow. Down below, green trams are going up and down Mannerheimintie, the five and a half kilometers long main street that begins from Erottaja, the most expensive lot in the Finnish version of Monopoly, and turns into highway 3 in the north end.

The McDonald’s sign may have been there 17 years ago, I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was. Neither was the Helsinki Music Centre, or the glass cube which is home to Sanoma, a major Finnish media house.

Mostly, the view over Helsinki looks exactly like it did in 1994 when the NHL took brought Teemu Selänne’s Winnipeg Jets came to town to show how things were done in North America.

» Continued