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.
There are several things that I like about this writing business, but one that really suits me well, is the fact that I don’t have to have an office that I have to go to write. I can just open my laptop cover and start typing. Well, sort of.
Here are a couple of my offices during this trip. The first one is the one where I typed the iihf.com game reports, and the second one is my hotel room. Not much glamour in this line of work, believe it or not.
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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.
Traveling can be a lonely business, even if you’re surrounded by people all the time. The biggest number of people I’ve been surrounded by on this trip is 11 417 (capacity crowd) but of course it’d be nice with some familiar faces.
There’s a family legend about one of my father’s hockey trips. It’s not about him, but I think it nicely captures the human need to feel at home. My Dad’s’ hockey team was in the Oldtimers’ World Championships in the UK somewhere. I may confuse this with his trip to the Edinburgh tournament but it doesn’t really matter.
There they were anyway, seeing the sights when a teammate of his said, “Look, there’s a sign in Finnish!”
And indeed there was. The sign said “Coca-Cola.”
Well, see this sign! It says “me”. Made me feel welcome in Bern, Switzerland.
The suitcase is wide open on the living room floor, pretty much packed. I’ve got my essentials, my T-shirts, jeans, underwear, suit, shirts, shoes, and books to take me through the hockey world championship extravaganza in Switzerland.
How many pairs of jeans would I wear at home in the next three weeks? Probably 1.5. How many T-shirts? Probably just six different ones, but with a good rotation, and yes, washed in between uses. Why do I then pack 4 pairs of jeans and 15 T-shirts?
Because you never know, that’s why. Better safe than sorry.
I’ve read two books in the past three weeks, which – on a rotating weekly average – is a record for the 2008-09 season, but for the trip, I’ve packed three novels, magazines, and hockey stats books.
Because, let’s face it, covering 32 games in 17 days – with two off days which aren’t really off days because those stories won’t write themselves – is a walk in the park and I’ll mostly be just reading and changing clothes.
So, for the next 20 days, I’ll be blogging, twittering, and skyping from Berne, Switzerland about all that, hockey, and how to travel light right here, a little here, twittering here, and blogging some more on THN’s site.
But right now, I’m already looking forward to coming back home in 20 days. And I imagine walking through those huge doors at the Arlanda airport, and seeing Jessica and the kids waiting for me, she holding a fresh caffe latte in her hand, and the kids dancing and singing songs about the best dad in the world. (Me.)
In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes about an experiment where people were given fifteen minutes to examine a student’s college dormitory to gather information about him. Afterwards, they were interviewed, and it turned out that they could describe the subject’s personality more accurately than his or her own friends.
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.
Sometimes it’s difficult, even impossible, to see cause and effect in things and I suppose it may be meaningless as well. Since Doc Brown’s DeLorean did get destroyed, we can’t go back in time, and what’s left is just a game of second-guessing.
The other day, I made a short trip to Finland on Finnair. I always check out the in-flight magazine out of professional curiosity and courtesy and this time, what caught my eye was a column about Finnish architecture.