futismatsi! (football match)

On Wednesday eleven of us went to watch Finland v Northern Ireland at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki. Being British I'm supposed to support N. Ireland, but anyone from England knows it doesn't work that way. Besides, I wanted to cheer on my temporarily-adopted country. On Tuesday some of us bought Suomi (Finland) t-shirts and flags so we were well prepared. Rachel and Diedre, the two irish girls, came with us wearing green. Few of the Finnish supporters seemed to wear the national colours so we kind of stood out as a group.

Spot the foreigners

Anyway, it was good fun although the Finnish are terrible at football chants. Literally all we heard was 'SUOMI! SUOMI!', whilst the Irish were constantly singing a wide range of songs. No wonder Finland lost! We tried singing English football songs, replacing 'England' with 'Suomi' but it didn't work too well and we kept chanting 'England!' by habit. Fellow-englishman Andrew came up with some classics though - 'Who ate all the reindeer' and 'There's only one F in Finland!'. I don't think they had much of a positive effect on the team though. If anything they seemed to perform worse!

Final score: Finland 1 - 2 Northern Ireland

Tonight we're going to a fireworks competition, which sounds interesting, then I think we're going clubbing. Only problem is we're going to Estonia tommorow and need to be at the boat by 7am. I don't know how I'm going to survive this weekend. We went to a club last night too and had classes starting early today. I haven't slept properly in weeks now, and I have the exam coming up next week so there's lots of studying to do, then next weekend I'm going to the Reading Festival and there'll definately be no resting there!