Hockey night in Nice

On this particularly rainy Saturday night, I decided to join Aki and Mikko I Nice for a bit of ice hockey action. The Nice Eagles were matching up against Reims, who are leading the league (or 1st division, rather). I joined Mikko (beer in hand already), just in time for the 1st face off. Aki joined us a bit later.

It was all rather entertaining actually, as sports spectacles go. To be sure, the level of play isn’t much to write home about, it’s not exactly NHL-standard play. A lot of mistakes are made, and there is basically no physical contact. But all the same, it’s quite entertaining.

Especially since we had two real experts at hand to give us all the insights of Nice ice hockey – Mikko (who plays in the amateur team), and his coach mister Juha Rantasila (who is a real legend of Finnish ice hockey – the award for the best defenseman of the Finnish top league is named after him). Nice did pretty well, slaughtering Reims 8-1 or something like that, and the Finns playing in the team did very well as well (recruited by Mr. Rantasila).

After the game, we joined up at the Darlington, a “Finnish restaurant” (the chef is Finnish – or I suppose he’s lived in France long enough to qualify as half-French), where we had a rather nice (and long) meal. Nice to meet a few more “Riviera Finns” as well.