A tough weekend series

This weekend we closed out our series with the Blues and had our first game with Ilves. They are the second team from Tampere in the league (Tappara was the first). Apparently all of the strong players from Tampere play on Ilves, and the rest play on the Tappara team (who we beat 6-5 in OT and 5-2).

The weekend started Friday night with a trip to Lahti for Dinner with Kelly and Tim. Sunday, Kelly had to fly out to return to sunny California, and it was our last chance to get out of the “Institute” before she left. As always, Tim has to check the lighted map to see where we are located.



So we started with a trip to the ski jumps in Lahti where the Finnish jumpers train. You can see Kelly beneath the lighted jumps at night. After the ski jumps, we headed to the main drag in Lahti, Alexanterinkatu, which we found out is the long Finnish way of saying Alexander St. The first place we saw, was a nice Italian restaurant and we headed in. The waitress asked if we had a reservation, and we said no, but luckily there was ONE open table. So, we started looking at the Finnish menus. After trying to decipher those for a while, the waitress said “I will get you English menus.” That made a big difference as we were trying to avoid any more of the shrimp pizzas. Dinner was good and fairly cheap at under 40 Euros for all three of us. It was an interesting crowd in the restaurant, 90% women over 45. We are wondering if there was a special that night. We wandered around the rest of the town after dinner, checking out a few local establishments, including a strange Finnish Karaoke place, an Irish Bar with a dance floor, and an upscale place with slow service. There were lots of people out and about and it was a pretty active place that evening.



Friday night it SNOWED! It really did brighten the place up quite a bit. You can see the same view of the lake from my cabin porch looks brighter in spite of the same grey sky.



So, Saturday, we headed back to Espoo to play the Blues. The girls had a little snowball fight as we were loading the bus and they seemed to be in good spirits. However, we did not play well in the first period and found ourselves down 5-1 at the end of that period. We did finally play a little better after that and battled to an 8-4 final. Before the game, Kelly took my camera with her and took some pictures of the lake which was right behind the rink in Espoo. It was quite a site with the fresh snow. On our way in we actually saw two women SWIMMING in this lake with just a one piece bathing suit!



This morning Kelly headed home as her vacation was over. After she headed to the airport, we boarded the bus to head to Tampere to play Ilves.

We were again haunted by our recent "bad period syndrome." Today,we chose the second period. After a first period which ended with our leading scorer getting pulled off on a stretcher, we were tied at 0 and playing strong. However, the team just did not refocus after that, and although the doctor patched her up and she returned to the game, we were down 5-1 after two. We did better in the third but still lost 7-2. It has been a tough week, but we have 5 days to regroup to get ready for our final 3 games in four days next weekend before departing.

Our Chinese fan base is still holding strong! Today, they brought a Chinese flag and were cheering throughout enthusiastically the entire game. You can see the team with them below.



Tomorrow will be a relaxing day off, before we get back to work again. Signing off from Vierumaki, where the days continue to get shorter, somehow?