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.
A couple of weeks ago, I found the local hockey club’s new magazine in our mailbox. Our Sollentuna Hockey is a tiny club, with a men’s team in the fourth highest division in Sweden, but it’s also one that is proud to have Mats Sundin as an alumnus. For the first issue they had even got an interview with the man himself.
That, naturally, pulled me in, and as I read the story at the breakfast table, I mumbled that I probably should go watch their games and support the local club. And that maybe Son would like to tag along.
“No, no, I’m not interested in such a violent sport,” said Son from across the table without looking up from his comic book.
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.
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.
How hungry am I? Well, I just had a cup of coffee, and then I ate the styrofoam cup. That didn’t help.
I’ve only had breakfast today. It was a good, big Scandinavian hotel breakfast, sure, with scrambled eggs, German wurst, two sandwiches, a croissant, and a cappuccino, but it was eight hours ago.
The reason why I haven’t eaten anything all day is that I’ve been working as a reporter, covering a visiting NHL team in Helsinki: watching their practices, and waiting for the players to come out of their dressing room to face people like me. And right now, I’ve been standing in the corridor outside their room for 50 minutes.
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.
Sometimes, late at night, when the neighbourhood is quiet, and even the teenagers with the mopeds have gone to bed, I wake up. It’s the silence that wakes me up, but when I sit up, and listen, I can hear a long, whining sound in the distance.
And I laugh.
For a fearful person, there can hardly be a worse place than the airport. An airport offers a concentration of people – and fears. There are the crowds, the closed spaces, the impending airplane ride. Public places mean lots of germs and lots of strange people. Foreigners who do not speak your language are everywhere.
For many of us, there is the common fear of buying a cup of coffee and realizing at the register that you do not have enough money and cannot speak the language – and are naked, too.
But mostly, airports are happy places.
Below is a story I wrote for Profile. Also, in the issue, there’s a fairytale version of a version of this. Check it out*.
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According to legend, Icarus didn’t listen to his father and flew too close to the sun, melting his wings. Angry Birds are ready to take their chances to become legendary. Then again, they aim for the moon.
Peter Vesterbacka has been called the most connected man in Finland, which, at face value, might not seem like much. Finland is, after all, a country with just a little over five million people. Vesterbacka’s rolodex, however, is not limited to just Finnish-sounding names.
One summer, twenty years ago, I decided that I wanted to play soccer again. I hadn’t done it in years, but I got some guys together, mostly my hockey teammates, and I signed us up for a season in a recreational league.
Our red shirts with “Ericsson Hotline” on the chest were a donation from my Dad’s store, the numbers on the back I had ironed on myself. After all, that’s what coach-GMs do.
In one August evening match, we had a new guy on the pitch, a lanky, blond guy who had a fantastic stride as he flew down the left lane. He was one of my late recruits, a necessary addition, due to some injuries and general summer recreational soccer league no-shows.
