My hobbies

My hobbies are Finnish baseball and golf. I am going to write mostly about my relationship to Finnish baseball. I practice both sports but next summer I will play only golf. I didn’t want to leave Finnish baseball totally, so I thought that I’m not going to play real games but I can still practice it. So if my golf career is a total disaster I can go back to play Finnish baseball.

There is one field in our backyard where we played a lot of baseball when we were younger. I didn’t know anything about that game, even if I was born in Loimaa and that was a really big Finnish baseball city in those days. I think the reason why I got interested in Finnish baseball was that it was so nice to play with friends. And now everybody is so “old” that nobody plays there anymore, and I think it’s a shame.

I was eight years old when I went to Finnish baseball school for the first time. The “School” is in summer holiday and there some Finnish baseball players teach us how to play that game. It takes about two weeks and after that is a big tournament. In my opinion it was the best part of that “school”, there you can play all day against different teams. I was there with my friend in many summers, but then we started playing and training Finnish baseball for real. We are not a good team for playing but our team spirit is the best. We have lost maybe more games than anybody else, but it has never stopped us loving that game.

Even if I started Finnish baseball and we haven’t won lot of games this is still something that I will never regret. I have made a lot of new friendships and rebuilt the old ones. My best friends are all from the team I play or their friends I have learnt to know. It might sound weird that after our practices I still want to hang out with these same people. If someone is your really good friend you won’t get bored with him or her.

Now it’s totally different to practice golf. We are a “competition team” but it’s still not the same as our Finnish baseball team. Our head coach is not going to make us all play as a team. All of the players are boys except me and my friend. The boys watch me like “you are girl, you can’t play” and that’s frustrating. When we have some physical exercise it is fun to watch these boys, when they are wondering why I can for example run such a long time. That’s another good thing about practicing Finnish baseball.

I have practices every day in a week and some days I have more than one practice, so my schedule is quite full. It’s really hard to combine school to that. I would never have enough time for school, golf and Finnish baseball so I think leaving Finnish baseball was right thing to do. But hopefully someday I will have enough time to be a golf or Finnish baseball coach. But now isn’t the right time to neglect school or friends, so coaching… maybe someday.

Not as we planned

Five years ago we were with my family and my friend’s family in Italy. We left from Turku airport. Our stop-overs were in Stockholm and the other was in Copenhagen. We landed at Milan airport and then we started a really long car drive to the Alps. It was my second time there. We skied a lot and we went also to Switzerland. On the last day of our vacation my friend broke her leg. Still she had to ski with us because we didn’t believe that her leg was seriously broken.

We drove back to Milano and our journey home started. We were about 5 am at Milano’s airport. Our flight from Copenhagen wasn’t able to come to Milano, so we didn’t have a flight back home. Some lady came to tell us that now we will got a bus drive to Milano’s other airport, and there would be flight to Tallinn. Because of horrible weather our flight was late, so when we landed we saw one Finnish plane leaving. It was our second flight to Turku and we missed it. Now the parents were really mad and my friend’s dad went to say bad comments to all of the flying company. It was embarrassing. We wondered wether to take a boat to Helsinki, but then we got a free hotel room and tickets to Helsinki for the next morning, so we stayed the night there. It was an awful night. We had one bed for three people. My friend wanted to sleep in the same bed with me and my sister, because she was so scared. In the morning we went back to the airport again. Now our flight left in time. We took the airport taxi from Helsinki to Kaarina. We were at home just a bit over 24 hours late.

Now this is our ¨funny¨ joke. Always is that same question: ¨what will happen this time?¨ Next year we missed our flight, and year after that it happened again.

by filip.farag