Spent a long weekend right after Mexico in Jyväskylä and Lahti for Rally Finland. Some of my best pictures and videos below (the rest are found here).
You can follow live every WRC race straight from your Nokia device.Lake in downtown LahtiDriving back to Jyväskylä
Abandoned cabin in UrriaAwards ceremony. Loeb won again.
Overall it was a very nice experience and now I understand why it is one of the iconic races in the WRC calendar. The only sad part was a small run in with a drunk racist jerk after I had briefly met MP Hakkarainen in my last night in town (“Smile and wave, smile and wave”). And people ask me why I tend to avoid the cities between Tampere and Lapland… 😉
No sé qué sea peor, que a los mexicanos en el extranjero automáticamente les pongan bigote y sombrero, o que a los finlandeses en el extranjero no les entiendan ni de dónde son. Me había tocado que confundieran a Finlandia con Irlanda, Tailandia o Filipinas, pero el premio se lo lleva una dependienta en una tienda en Ixtapa que confundió al país donde vivo con Disneylandia. O_o
Obviamente semejante “lapsus” combinado con mi natural simpleza ha creado un sinnúmero de situaciones imaginarias cuyas dotes cómicas dependerán en gran medida del estado de la audiencia:
The Finnish national passion is ice hockey, where unfortunately the team hasn’t been as successful as their fan involvement would warrant. The only world championship until last week’s victory was won in 1995, and the party then has become legendary.
I was finally able to experience that this week. People started to believe in the team after the victory over Russia in the semis, where Mikael Granlund’s lacrosse-style goal has become the centerpiece of many a highlight reel. Then, the final itself was a thriller: Sweden led the scoreboard until Finland tied at the end of the second period, showing a strength of mind that many of their predecessors lacked (the ignominious 5-6 of 2003 comes to mind) and then went on a roll to win the championship.
The celebrations in Helsinki were wild and kicked off on Sunday night. The reception of the champions was organised in the Market Square the day after, and over 100,000 people attended (the whole country has 5.3 million people, so one could say almost 2% of Finland was there to celebrate).
The only black spots were the obvious inebriation of many in the team and the not-very-child-friendly music selection for what was a very public party, but in the end it was a shot of self-esteem and unity Finland really needed.
P.S. I think they should use Antero Mertaranta for the listening portion of the Yleiskielentutkinto (the official Finnish language exam). That’d make it hard enough! 😀
My friends at Café de Nopal have been offering birria tacos (goat Jalisco style) with broth for some time now, so I decided to try to prepare reindeer the same way. The result was excellent, probably one of the best attempts at Finnish-Mexican fusion I’ve gone for.
Reindeer birria, tacos & broth
Ingredients (serves 4)
16 tortillas
1 kg of reindeer meat without bone (luuton sisäpaisti)
2 cloves of garlic
6 dried Chile de árbol chillies (without seeds, sliced and diced)
1 dried chile ancho (without seeds, sliced and diced)
2 teaspoons of cumin
4 tomatoes (sliced and diced)
½ onion (sliced and diced)
salt
Cooking oil
Coriander
Mexican salsa roja or taquera
Green lemons/limes
Warm the oil and fry the garlic, onion and chillies until they’re soft. Add half a litre of water and the cumin. Let boil a few minutes. Blend this mix and then sift it. Return the sauce to the fire and add4 litres of water. Cut the meat in small cubes and add it together with the tomato. Leave cooking for 3-4 hours, add more water if necessary. Serve the broth separately from the meat. Warm the tortillas. Offer some sliced and diced onion with coriander and lemons on the side for people to put together their own tacos. Serve with Mexican rice and pico de gallo on the side.
The lack of posts lately has a very simple reason: I became a father two weeks ago. Feedings, diapers, sleepless nights, and peaceful moments show I’ve joined what a friend of mine calls “the happy insomniac’s club”. There are plenty of things that have already happened, and an unimaginable amount more in store, but it’s all worth it.
Our music collection has contributed to the mood, with lots of stuff from Cri-Crí, Finnish children’s melodies and classical music, but the little guy seems to also like the heavy rock we used to listen while he was still in the womb.
The 2000’s were the years that started with the menace of Y2K, gave us 6 years of Bush, the Argentine peso crash, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorist attacks in Madrid, London & Mumbai, the bomb in Myyrmanni, wars in Chechenya and Georgia, the Asian tsunami, the floods of Tabasco, Katrina, protests in Ukraine & Thailand, two stock market crashes, wars in Liberia, Congo and Somalia, the Jokela & Kauhajoki school shootings, the drug war & ended with the Haiti earthquake.
However, they also gave us the rise of the rest of the globalized countries and the formation of the G-20, the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the rescue of the Chilean miners, the spread of mobile communication, the fast adoption of broadband, the dramatic reduction of poverty in certain areas and the improving availability of basic sanitation in many others, though you won’t see that in the news ;).
The country where I was born has seen ten years of democracy, but also ten years of disorder and lack of statesmanship. The country where I have lived for most of this decade has experienced more change than some of its people would like, it’s showing itself more to the world but the world has also arrived in numbers to its shores. It’s not a homogeneous as it used to be.
Ten years might be a short time in geological or astronomical terms, but teenagers become adults in that time :).
