Three months vacation

Yesterday the Finnish Parliament met for its first autumn session after a summer break of nearly three months that is even a longer vacation than the school kids get every year. Quite a long vacation I gather so I really hope they all are well rested by now and ready for some action and have lots of improvements and changes in store for all of us living in here Finland. I guess we all could do with a three month vacation a year.

The Finnish ice-hockey championships also began yesterday for this season with a match between HIFK and HPK with a 3-2 win to HIFK. I don’t even know for sure whether the championships are held annually but I guess so as there always seems to be some hockey game broadcasted instead of one or other of my accustomed TV shows. I wonder how long vacations the ice-hockey players get?

Being totally ignorant in sports, except my newly discovered interest in the fun art of swamp football, or swamp soccer as it also is called, I got curious and checked out both hockey teams’ homepages.

And surprise, surprise, only one team told what their real name is on their pages, what their abbreviation stands for. I still don’t know what HIFK means, but from the advertisements on their pages I guess they come from Helsinki which means that the H stands for Helsinki but what the rest is I have no idea if it is in Finnish. If the IFK is in English I do know it. HPK actually told their name on their homepages, Hämeenlinnan Pallokerho so there I am wiser today than I was yesterday.

One thing that bothers me over and over again here in Finland is this corner-patriotism that exists, that everybody is expected to be aware of certain things like where cities, places, businesses and shops are. In advertising their products the Finns leave out mentioning the address of their business and their phone numbers as everybody is to be aware of who and where they are and the advertising doesn’t really change from one media to another, it’s the same missing info in the papers, TV and radio. At least one can always google things but that takes time and effort and I bet they loose a lot of business through that and not all companies have as yet bothered to get their own homepages with more info than just the address and phone number and me being curious I would like to know more.