A Day in Kouvola

February29:

Hey guys.  Happy Leap Day!  Maybe the extra day doesn't mean much to you, but for me I'm always happy to celebrate a holiday, even if the day isn't technically a holiday.  Leap day means the Summer Olympics are coming, and I love the summer games almost as much as the World Cup so I get pretty psyched about Leap Day.  As you know since you read everyday, I went to Kouvola today with Kenny and Vili.  It was a pretty fun .  The best thing about going to Kouvola though was simply leaving Myllykoski.  Any reason to leave this place is a good reason.  I made this video right before we left.

As you can see, it was a beautiful day to take a day trip.  The sun was shining and we were ready to go to the big city!  Once downtown, we realized that Kouvola was indeed not that big, but still interesting.  Over the next five hours we walked around the city centre and generally enjoyed ourselves.  It's a bit embarrassing, but my favorite part of the day was going shopping at Dressmann, a store that sells dressy-type clothes.  I bought some clothes on the sales rack and everything cost me 20 euros total!  I bought two semi-dressy shirts, dressy pants and a nice outdoor jacket.  The jacket was 100 euros normally, the pants 40, and the shirts 40 each.  Maybe I’ll get around to posting pictures sometime.  For now here's a picture of that shopping center.

In addition to bargain shopping, we also used this trip to take go to a few restaurants.  There are no restaurants in Myllykoski, except for a pizza place.  First, we went to Hessburger, a fast food burger place.  The boys got burgers, but I went for the fish and chips.  I went to England for the first time last year, and the only thing (other than the people) that I missed was the fish and chips.  Just one restaurant wasn’t enough though, and after a few hours we went to another one called Angelina’s and got some chicken and pasta.  We have to be ready for our double trainings tomorrow!

There’s really not much more to say about Kouvola.  It was disappointingly small.  There was plenty of shopping though, so if I end up signing here at MYPA then I will at least have a way to kill some time on the off days.  My next trip if I’m still here next week will be to Helsinki, so stay tuned.  I’ll let you know how it goes!

Payday sucks when you don't get paid! And MonsterDogs.

February 28:

Today was supposed to be my first payday in Finland/Europe.  My contract with Haka was slated to pay me $2150 per month after tax + a free apartment.  Maybe MYPA will pay me for the week I’ve been here?  Lol I’m not holding my breath on that one.  Anyways…

I don’t really want to go much into the trainings here but there are a couple things I’ve got to get off my chest and since I’m absolutely sure no one in Myllykoski reads this (or much anyone outside of my family), I can say what I want.  First, our trainings have been 75% intrasquad scrimmages.  That’s fine, nothing wrong there I guess, but we only have 20 guys.  That means that we play 10v10 on an enormous field.  The result is something closer to basketball than soccer.  One team sends six attackers versus four defenders in a huge wave.  They either score, kick behind for a goal kick, get dispossessed or have their shot saved by the goalkeeper.  Literally regardless of what happens, the other team immediately begins a counterattack the other way.  It’s like this team is coached by Paul Westphal and Mike D’Antoni.  This is a ridiculous way to play the scrimmages because in the end nobody gets better at all.  In the match the team didn’t make 10 consecutive passes at any time, yet in the training we don’t try to pass, we try to run up and down the field as fast as possible.  I wish the coach would say something but maybe that’s what he’s looking for.  There’s a reason why he’s got a head coaching job and I have no job.  Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining since I get breakaways every single practice and score every practice.  If this team had more than one player signed who could score, then this approach could actually work.  I guess I’ll have to be that guy.

Second, we have a training program that makes absolutely no sense.  We had two medium difficulty training sessions on Monday, one physical training today (Tuesday) at the clubhouse, tomorrow (Wednesday) is off, then we train twice again on Thursday and once on Friday before playing Saturday.  It seems that we could find a more consistent schedule, especially since each training requires a 20km drive to the turf field.  That’s it for my soccer rambling.

-----------------------------------------------

People here seem to just not care about the weather at all.  I’ve been having allergy problems since Saturday, but I refuse to go to the pharmacy today because it’s snowing like the world’s about to end.  It’s only 4:30pm but it must have snowed close to a foot already today.  However, I keep looking outside and see people walking their bear-dogs.  Side note: all the dogs here have a hilarious amount of fur.  Every single dog looks like some long lost four legged creature from the Ice Age that you’d see at the Smithsonian.  One lady walked by with two dogs that must have weighed 70 pounds each and looked like wooly mammoths.  She could just have easily have ridden those things around town.

Tomorrow I will venture into central Kouvola, the most urban area around.  I’ll be heading down with two trialists who are staying here with me, Vili and Kennny.  Vili is from Finland and has his car here so we’ll make the 20km drive into town and have a nice day.  I’ll take some pictures!

Coming to Kouvola...uh, I mean Myllykoski

February 21:

Today was pretty boring but noteworthy because I have now arrived at my next trial with MYPA (mee-pa).  The club is located in Myllykoski, which is part of a group of towns that form Kouvola.  Of course, things being the way they have been thus far in Finland, I had no idea that the club was not in the center of Kouvola.  What that meant was that instead of staying and training in a relatively good sized city (Kouvola’s city center is upwards of 50,000 people in a space about the quarter the size of Indianapolis or Tampa’s downtowns), I was staying in a village of what can’t be more than a couple thousand people.  Myllykoski is by far the smallest town I have visited in my time here.  It makes Valkeakoski seem like a metropolis.

That said, at least I’m here.  After waking up and schlepping my luggage to the rail station, I took three trains and six and a half hours to reach the Kouvola train station.  There I awaited my ride…and waited. 

And waited. 

After two hours finally, mercifully, a player came to the rescue and picked me up.  The player was really nice though and put my mind at ease.  That is, until I got to the place where I’m staying.  It’s an apartment that is connected to the club office and it is a nightmare.  In stark contrast to the nice hotels I’ve been staying at up until this point, this place is more or less a dump.  The electricity isn’t even working is most of the rooms.  I’m writing this blog post from the kitchen, since the room I’m staying in has no lighting whatsoever and the plugs in the room don’t work.  My room doesn’t even have a door.  If I had a normally functioning laptop I could just charge it up and then work from my room, but like a big dum dum I bought my laptop on craigslist and therefore it carries no charge and shuts off the second it’s disconnected from the charger.  Oh well…

Complaining aside, I’m ready to get this trial going.  Tomorrow probably won’t be much as the club just played a match today (they won, 2-1).  Maybe the sun coming up will give me a sunnier disposition.  I hope so, because the way I feel now makes me wonder if coming to Finland was even a good idea.  I had a lot of optimism in traveling over here, but a series of bad things happening has made me wonder if maybe success here just isn’t in the cards for me.  I was a starter with a contract at Haka and they let me go, then I played well and was dangerous in a position of need for Jaro and they let me go as well.  Hopefully MYPA will see that I’m good enough to help and offer me a contract based on that, but even then I don’t know if I even want to stay here.  If I get an offer I guess I would have to take it since there are no others, but I have to weigh my unhappiness against the small salary and relatively long odds of moving to somewhere bigger and better.  But those are tough decisions that professionals have to make.  And I’ve got a ways to go before I can even get to that point.  We’ll see what tomorrow brings.