Since I’m up here in the north it’s only fitting I try some winter sports. Hockey is very popular here in Sweden. If I remember correctly Lulea’s team was second in national league this year and Sweden took the first place in world championship.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been gathering some hockey equipment, I’ve managed to find some (really bad) skates, which I’ll have to replace asap, I’ve bought second hand stick and knee protectors and took my skiing helmet (although it looks stupid).

Today was our first training/practice. We divided in to two groups, those who knew how to skate and wanted to play and those who just wanted to practice skating. For some reason I took the first team. It was really fun, although I have a feeling we were playing only against Swedes, because they were scoring goals every 45 seconds. I managed to score two goals myself. No one was keeping score but at the end I think we scored around 15 goals and other team scored like 50 (again they were all Swedes from LURC 😀 ).

During the game you become surprisingly hot, a lot of people were playing in t-shirts, I had a winter jacket on and at the end I was as wet as if I jumped in to a pool. We played 4 vs 4 with 2 people in reserve with whom we exchanged places every few minutes. At the beginning I just wanted to play and spent as little time as possible in reserve, but towards the end I was so tired that I went to reserve every minute.

Now, at home I’m starting to feel every muscle (or lack of them) in my body. I think I only fell 3 or 4 times but the last fall was really spectacular, somehow I made a backflip directly on to my elbow. It’s already turning purple. I should have bought some elbow protectors before first practice …

We played in the big hockey arena (although not on the main field) in the centre of the town. First few practices will be free, but later on we’ll divide the rent of arena among the players. Contradictory to everything else here in Sweden lending hockey field for 1.5h is only 15€ (for whole field not for 1 person), for comparison in Slovenia its 180€.