Last night, I held a pretty decent speech to Son, about owning up to things. About how it takes more courage to stand up and confess a mistake than it takes to … do something else. I can’t remember what the other stuff was, but it was something very macho, and tough, like to do a jedi jump.

I went on a good ten minutes about the importance of being a great loser, and then of course, told him how, at the Olympics, all the players had to walk through the mixed zone and talk about the loss they had just been delivered.

And for good measure, I threw in Henrik Lundqvist’s name because I know it carries some major weight around here. So, if Henke Lundqvist can come ut and talk to the press right after he’s faced four shots and made just one save in one period in an Olympic quarterfinal, then Son can surely muster up some courage to tell me who it really was that spilled that glass of orange juice onto the carpet.

Right?

Great losers aren’t born. They’re made.

So I went to a place called "Olympics" and the next thing I know, three weeks just flashed by. I hope you had your "risto+pakarinen" Google alerts on, and caught at least some of my stuff on IIHF.com during the games and the Games.

Like this blog entry, about an event of which I wrote here earlier.

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Twenty-five years ago, a friend of mine received a tape in the mail. It was a black, regular tape he had got from a friend from home, including the hottest hits at the time. For my friend, Terry, home was Canada, and that tape had the keys to Canadian Rock Wonderland, namely Bryan Adams’s "Reckless".

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Wake-up call: 5:55 am. Get dressed, walk out the door, meet a colleague at the edge of Stanley Park. Mission: To witness Arnold Schwarzenegger carrying the Olympic torch. Why the Governator would be carrying the Olympic torch in Vancouver on the last day of the relay was a mystery to me.

Sure, “The Austrian Oak” is a six-time Mr. Olympia, but he’s never participated in the Olympics. He’s not Canadian, he's Austrian American with no special connection to Canada as far as I know.

But, run he would, and that had to be seen.

And that’s why I headed out into the darkness, and that’s why I was ordering a tall latte at 6:15 am. I had five minutes to kill - I was supposed to meet Lucas at 6:20 – and, well, Starbucks is never far in this city.

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Greetings from Vancouver, the host city of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. It’s a long way from Stockholm to Vancouver (via London), and my total travel time form door to door was 21 hours. I spent ten of them on the plane from London to Vancouver, sitting next to Victor Droop, a Dutch fellow on his way to the Olympics as well.

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Last weekend, I was in Minsk, Belarus, to see the Russian KHL’s All-Star Game. After the game, I was standing in the mixed zone, listening to former NHLer Ville Peltonen, also a Finnish national hero thanks to his hat trick in a World Championship final against Sweden in 1995, when some fans showed up.

They said, “pleez, pleez” and gave Peltonen some small flags, posters, and a pen. He said, “sure,” and signed a half a dozen autographs, and posed for a few photos.

(Some of my colleagues thought it was such a no-no that the KHL should be fined, but my story’s not going there).

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It’s been twenty years since I last read Peanuts, but I used to be a huge fan. A huge fan. Reading about Charlie Brown taught me a lot about life, I discovered new words - “anxiety”, anyone - but mostly they just made me laugh. I could relate to all of the characters at some point in my life.

What a joy it was for a little pre-teen Finnish hockey guy to find a Zamboni on the pages of Peanuts, let alone strips abut Snoopy playing hockey. “Here’s the world famous hockey player winding up for one of his spectacular slap shots…”

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I can say that I pretty much compete with everyone, with the exception of three people and those three happen to share my street address and my love for the “Make’em laugh” scene in Singing in the Rain. (Although, to be one hundred percent honest, I think I love it the most. And I’d be perfectly happy to say I finish second in that race, but I don’t).

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I like my name. I like my initials. The letter R is a very special one to me. I used to love the blinking R that marked replays on sports broadcasts. I sign my emails with just a single R, and my little hand-written notes to friends and family with a backwards R, like the one in Toys R Us.

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“Who’s going to like a guy who’s just being funny and doesn’t even want to wear socks?”
– Son, a week before Christmas, 2009

Your mother, Son, your mother. And I’m not talking about your mother as your mother, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, let me explain. Your mother, my wife, the smiling little chickity that takes care of business in and around the house, once fell in love with a guy who was just being funny, and never, ever, wore socks in his shoes.

(He did wear shoes).

Yes, that would be me.

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Ten years ago today, I put my hand on J’s knee when we were sitting at a bar just around the corner from the office. The bar, Krokodil, was a gay bar that served cold beer and good food for the people that could fit in the eight tables it had.

We were there, a group of us, and at some point, late that night, I rested my hand on J’s knee, a gesture that - I have been told later - sent shock waves through her body. At the time, I was unaware of this.

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Today, Dec 6, is Finland’s Independence Day. I will spend it on a ferry to Sweden. How appropriate.

I have never been as Finnish as during my first two years living in Sweden. I moved to Sweden in April, and by Christmas, I was an ultrafennomaniac. I read only Finnish classics, I listened to Finnish music, and I basically spent my weekends on those ferries, going back to the old country, to the old hood and the old buddies.

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They say that the more something changes, the more it stays the same. In case you’re wondering who “they” are, the answer is Huey Lewis and the News, who had that line in “I Know What I Want“ on their Fore! album.

I can now tell you that the reverse is also true. The more something stays the same, the more it changes.

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In a couple weeks, a K-1 tournament is going to be held somewhere in Sweden, Stockholm, or the surrounding international waters. Now, the fairly new combat sport has a lot of fans, and it attracts a lot of people, and I guess it’s gaining in popularity.

On the advertising posters that you can see in the Stockholm subway cars, they run a few quotes from papers to add creditibility to the event.

One of them is by an evening paper columnist and it goes like this: “… this is the future.”

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In the last five years, I’ve conducted more interviews than I ever imagined I would. Somehow, while I do (kind of) like people, and am (kind of) curious to learn about new things, and get (kind of) excited (kind of) easily, I’ve never really seen myself as an interviewer - because somewhere deep down, I still (kind of) know that I’m (kind of) shy.

And when you think about it, the interview person is holding all the cards, really, unless you happen to know something that he doesn’t know you know, but that’s never happened to me.

Straightforward postgame interviews can be frustrating and exciting at the same time.

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Here’s the joke of the day.

“What do you get when you throw a mobile phone in a bathtub?
Answer: Speech bubbles."

Pretty good, right? Before you scroll down and start ripping the joke apart - as is the custom on the Internet - let me add this tiny bit of information: The joke was written by my son, six years old.

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A part of hockey’s lure has to be in the equipment. There’s something magical in the ritual of putting on all that gear that looks nothing like anything in the real world. Nothing.

Gloves are so padded that when the players do the now-ubiquitous gloved hand-clap to thank the fans after a game, it looks bizarre, unnatural. Same goes for the helmet, the socks (yeah, right), and the pants.

When I was four years old, following my father to hockey games in Helsinki, I was fascinated by goalies who, to me, looked like freaks of nature. I mean, where did these people live? I had never seen such creatures - with their wide legs, their chubby upper bodies, and their big, blocky hands - out on the streets.

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Doing the post-game interview can be tough, especially after a loss. But, being the professional that I like to think I am, of course I was ready for one … even if the walk upstairs was a long one, made even heavier by the weight of the loss on my shoulders.

The winner was already sitting in the booth when I got there. I saw the door with the sign, “Announcer / head referee”, at the end of the room. When I opened it, I saw her sitting in a special chair, smiling, and chatting with the said announcer, a legend in his field, mind you.

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When a baby is born in Finland, it is customary for the godmother (or father) to buy him (or her) a spoon that has the baby’s vital stats engraved in it. At that point in time, the stats are height and weight at birth as well as the date and time of birth.

And - naturally - the name.

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When I was a small boy living in Finland, my teacher told my class that despite Finnish being a small language with only about five million speakers, there were in fact two words that the rest of the world had adopted from us: sauna, and sisu.

For emphasis, that story was then followed by another one about Finnish UN soldiers in the Middle East, and how the first thing they did at their post was to build a sauna.

(For sisu, and sauna, see here.)

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About nine years and eight months ago, I received an email from a pretty, young lady. The subject of the email was, “I hope you visit this site every day”, with the appropriate link attached to the body of the message.

http://www.thehungersite.com

The link took me to a site which I obviously hadn’t ever visited - the Hunger Site which helps to feed the hungry in Africa - but which I just as obviously visited right then.

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It’s become painfully obvious to everybody that I am no handyman. I’m not somebody whose idea of having a great time is to disappear into the garage and fix stuff. My idea of a good time is to hang around that person and talk and maybe play ball.

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I can think of at least five meetings I’ve been invited to sit in just because I am Finnish. Not that I didn’t enjoy sitting in - I’m pretty fond of the Swedish meeting culture with the coffee and the bullar, the cinnamon buns - and not that I took it as an insult or so, I just thought it was pretty obvious to everybody that I was there just so our company could show the prospective (Finnish) client that we had intimite knowledge of Finland, and Finns. We had one sitting right there in the office. Me.

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I just bought a new bike, and realized, again, how much fun riding a bike is, but then I read Christopher McDougall's "Born to Run," and I think - I think - that even though I have said (many times) in the past that "Running Is The Devil", I may give running one more chance, just because I also like the idea of running barefoot.

After all, I ran barefoot to school and back, ten kilometers, uphill, each way, through the snow, when I was a kid.

Good times.

Official announcement from the office of Risto Pakarinen: I am the new new renaissance man of the 21st century, the kind who can’t do anything. By “do” I mean fix things, plant anything, or make any visible - constructive, literally - changes in my surroundings.

But I can play ball.

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Being the President of Finland still seems to have some pull. Yesterday, H, the boy genius - both self-proclaimed and encouraged by parents - surprised me right in the middle of a nice bike ride to the grocery store.

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Our family is bilingual, and since I write a lot in English, I switch between three languages all the time, every day. Every language is special in its own way, and each of them portray my personality in a slightly different way.

Even my voice is a little different depending on whether I’m speaking Finnish, Swedish, or English, let alone the style of my speech. A good American friend of mine once noted that while he was getting more fluent in Swedish while living in Stockholm, he always counted money in English. I seem to be doing the same, only, I count in Finnish.

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Seems to me that life is a chain of small races, competitions. I’m sure there are people out there who don’t care about competing that much, and who are happy just to participate, but I'm not one of them.

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“Hejdå, good old apartment, thanks for everything,” I said, and if you had been standing where J was, you would have heard what she heard: that my voice did crack a little. When J took a step back inside she saw the same thing I saw, looking at her: A tiny little tear in the corner of the eye.

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Today I learned that sometimes just a small change can turn an ordinary thing into a very funny one when my son, the bilingual genius, accidentally turned the word "eyebrows" into "broweyes".

I also learned that sometimes even the funniest things don't translate very well from Finnish into English.

Sitting at the real estate agent's office today, the nice lady selling her old house to us was telling us what a pain it was to move. But that, fortunately, she hadn't had to do that very often. That's when my wife jumped in with the facts*.

(* Still unverified).

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Just to let you know: I finished both Monday's and Tuesday's crosswords this week. And correctly, too, not filling the blanks with random letters – like I'm known to have done in the past.

Filed under "true story".

Music can transcend time and place like nothing else (except apparently smell). Hearing a song can bring back memories that you didn't know you even had. And then make you wonder why you have them.

Here are my two examples. Except I know.

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Four weeks ago, I was sitting in the same chair I am sitting in now, writing an article, when I once again looked at the Bobby Orr photo hanging on the wall in front of me. It's funny that the photo is such an inspiration, even if I never saw the game, didn't grow up idolizing Orr, and don't really know that much about that particular final series.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 12, 2009

RISTO PAKARINEN TAKES A DAY OFF

STOCKHOLM – Risto Pakarinen, writer, hockey writer, blogger, and the CEO of ristopakarinen.com, announced today his plan to take off an entire day. Pakarinen said he will not be working on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, “not even a little bit.”

“After almost 350 different articles in the last year, and having just covered 32 hockey games in 17 days, I feel it’s time for a break,” Pakarinen says.

“It is my firm intention that this blog entry will be the only thing I write today. I will not check my email or spend hours online idly chatting with people, will not text people or sit on the phone all day, but instead I will just buy some food, make some dinner, watch TV, and sleep, possibly read a book,” he adds.

Mr Pakarinen recently returned home from Bern, Switzerland where he had been covering the hockey World Championship since April 24. While the tournament was a huge success for Mr Pakarinen, it was also a trying experience physically and emotionally. He’s confident, though, that a 24-hour break is enough to restore his vigor.

“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow,” he says.

----------------------------------------------------
For additional information and photos of Risto Pakarinen, please see www.ristopakarinen.com or contact

Hannes Pakarinen, hannespakarinen at gmail dot com

I like beef and veal. I like steamed vegetables, and I like beans. Rice, pasta, noodles, bring it on, I'm game.

But eating the beef or the veal, with the veggies, maybe some rice/pasta on the side, twice a day, for 17 days, has made me want for some pasta a la Risto, or pizza. And a fresh salad.

First off, exactly a year ago, I had no idea how little I knew about Switzerland. Now that I have been here almost a dozen times in the past 12 months, and find myself halfway through a three-week stay, I can see that I didn't know anything.

What I have learned recently is that the fact that I didn't know a lot about Switzerland (but thought I did) is exactly the most Swiss thing there is. They're hard to pigeonhole, those Swiss.

It's difficult to describe what the Swiss generally look like - they seem to be very outdoorsy - and I get no direct visual association of "Switzerland", like I get with, say, "France", "Spain", "Germany", or "Italy". Not immediately anyway.

If I think about it for a while, I can see a huge Toblerone chocolate bar, then cheese fondue.

Which, interestingly enough, I have not seen a glimpse of here. Yet.

Part of the charm with working at an international event like the hockey World Championships is seeing (and observing) people from all over the world. True, with hockey, it's mostly the white, male part of the population I can observe, but even in that sample, there are some fascinating observations to be made.

Really.

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In the blue corner, 95 centimeters, weighing 14.5 kilograms, at three years and 40 days we have Hilda who read this sign at a store yesterday.



Or at least the top part of it. She said, "Mother dear" - no, not really, but wouldn't it be great? - "the signs says 'stop'."

And as you can see, it sure does. So the girl can read at 3, tying the family record. That's what you get for doing everything your big brother does – if your big brother is the self-proclaimed "Reader Boy".

When movies get pirated, often the subtitles are missing. Or, if the subtitles are there, they’re as Chinese as the guy whose head you can see a couple of times between you and the movie.

And where there’s a will, there's a way. Demand meets supply, simple as that. There are several actors in the underground subtitling business in Sweden, for example, but they’re not all in it just out of the goodness of their hearts, making subtitles available on the Web to advance foreign films’ status in Sweden.

No, no.

Swedish Dagens Nyheter ran a story about just that the other day, with this quote from “Jimmi” at Swesub, one of those companies.

“If we upload new subtitles on [our site] at Swesub, they’ll be available at Undertexter in just a couple of minutes. It sucks that somebody’s making money off of our work, without giving anything back to us.”

It’s a crime, I say.

Yesterday, I interviewed a Finnish wind energy expert who gave me the name of another expert to talk to, this guy a Swedish one.

Nothing special, at all, you're right. I made a note of the email with the guy's contact info, but not much more. Today, I copied his email address off the email, typed a message and sent it off. Another day at the office, another interview booked. Five minutes later, I got an error message about the message being undeliverable so I had to send the message again. And because the address was wrong, I had to edit it.

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In my previous entry I wrote that "I was slow again", which is actually not really true. I'm not a slow person, at all, but when I typed that I was making a mental reference to one instance where I came late into the picture. I can't seem to find it anywhere on this blog, even though I was sure I had written about it.

Anyway. This is what happened.

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Helsinki airport, April 4, 7.30 a.m. Temperature: +1° C

Boarding a plane to Stockholm, temperature at destination: +5° C.

But this is a Finnair flight:

Last night, a friend of mine was talking to a friend of his about me. And he said that I was from Joensuu, which he knows is a bit of sore point to me, then corrected himself and said, “Well, really, he’s from here but he…” and he glanced at me.

I was born in Helsinki, I lived here until I was 14, and moved back to Helsinki when I was 18.

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Probably the next big thing to come out of Finland: Liquorice. It's amazing that it hasn't conquered the world already but I predict that its time has come. It's delicious, it's delicious, and it's delicious.

There's already a great liquorice store in Stockholm, but if you ever get to Finland try to get your hands on Kouvolan Lakritsi (Kouvola Liquorice). It's the best liquorice in Finland. And they say so themselves.

I don't know how many times I've driven through Varkaus on my way to Joensuu where I went to high school and where my father lives, but it must be in the hundreds. And each time, and especially since meeting Jessica and making that trek together with her, I always say out loud: "This city is tops my list of 'cities I don't want to live in'".

Varkaus.

The word means "theft."

And the image of the city goes downhill from there. Varkaus is mostly hiding under the smoke - which is probably not real smoke but just steam - from the paper mill which is right in the center of the city. There's a unpleasant smell, and the buildings look a little run-down. I just want to keep driving.

Well, now I have spent a night at a local hotel, and I'm afraid my list stays unchanged. Time to hit the road.

But enough about me. Where would you never want to live?

Kuopio, a city in the Finnish heartland, some four hours north of Helsinki. Four hours and maybe a couple of years. It used to be about ten, but news travel fast these days.

Kuopio, a city in the heart of Savo, a region known for sneakiness and twisted humor. As the old Finnish proverb goes, "when somebody from Savo talks, the listener bears all responsibility." And like most clichés, this one is true, and very much alive.

As I arrived to the rink tonight, I was told to go to the door and ask for tickets that had been left for me there. I walked to the door and introduced myself, and said that there should be two tickets for me. The man at the door looked at me and goes, "no tickets here..."

My jaw dropped.

"... but I have your name on the list," he said, laughing so that his entire body shook.

Talking with these Savo people on April Fool's Day is just asking for it.

Being a Finn living in Sweden, I'm in the privileged position of always being right when there's a question of these two countries. "How dare you question my patriotism for Finland?" or "How dare you tell me that you know better what Swedes are like, I've been here for ten years – and my kids are Swedish." (Or Finnish, depends on who's asking).

A friend of mine always says I'm living behind the enemy lines. Well, I'm going back to the old country for a few days again, and I thought I'd blog my way through it. So come back and refresh often. (Really, grab that RSS feed while you can).

I'm going deep, too. Kuopio. Rhymes with nothing.

Since I have been working from my home office for over five years now, I'm not a regular commuter, and therefore, not a regular subway train passenger. I'd (almost) like to be, I find the subway to be a great place to read and listen to my precious podcasts.

And to get a feel what "they" think. And judging by the trip I made today, people don't read newspapers as much as they did five years ago. Which is naturally no surprise, we knew that. But now I've seen it with my own eyes.

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