Lahti, Party and a Cancellation...

On Saturday February 1st a group of students decided to join the FIS worldcup competition of ski jumping in Lahti. It's only about one hour by train (strange: regardless if you take the suburban train or the IC, it takes exactly the same time) from Helsinki and on Saturday, thousand of people were supposed to be there.

We left Helsinki about 10:00am, having already nice impressions in the train. Next to me there was a 60-year-old Finn. He obviously was still (or already - at least he still was drinking from his bottle of Whiskey) completely drunk and told us several interesting facts about Finland and the differences between Finnish and Swedish girls. In fact, everybody was happy when he left the train again after 20 minutes as we got to know what "drinking passively" means.















Arriving in Lahti, we again had to accept the fact that Finland is a terrible country concerning architecture. It seems that the geographical proximity to Russia (or - looking at the buildings - still the Soviet Union) had a huge influence on the style of Finnish architecture. The center is an accumulation of DDR-looking buildings in a terrible style. Still, it's possible that this impression was only that negative because of the terrible weather (cold, humid and windy = that's what a David doesn't like at all).

Approaching to the ski jump arena, everything got better. Thousands of people were there already in the early afternoon and it seems that especially Finnish girls have bias for Austrian ski jumpers. The secondmost flag I could see was definetely the Austrian (both in the faces and in the hands). As we luckily could get some color for our faces, everybody tried best to paint the face in the colors of the favoured country. Especially mind the Slovenian flag (I painted it - doesn't it look good?)!
















































































Later in the afternoon, everything seemed to be ready for the competition. All the nations were already presented, the jumpers already prepared themselves. We didn't really recognize that everything was already late about one hour. Rumours went round, nobody really knew what was going on. Suddenly, the jumpers walked down again. Cancelled because of crosswinds (as aviators would say) was the thing we could hear out of the loudspeakers. DAMN!

Don't worry, be happy we thought. Just skip the competition and directly go to the aftershow. Arriving there, the next problem. No more tickets available. OK, we said, that's enough for Lahti, let's go home. A party was supposed to be in Kannelmäki, organized by some exchange students. Arriving there at 10:00pm, we had the same impression again: completely crowded, in this 80sqm flat were about 120 persons, unbelievable. Still, this party was great again (like all the time in Kannelmäki) until midnight when Helsinki Police stopped everything. Unfortunately, the Austrian method (asking policemen if they want to have something to drink - or even a soup) didn't really work but at least no more consequenced followed after promising not to be that loud anymore (which was easy because most people went to the city anyway - except me and some others who don't accept the pricing policy in Helsinki on weekends).