I had already decided on the topic of sport before the exchange, but I wasn’t quite sure what exactly. During the exchange I noticed that ice hockey is a very popular sport in Finland, so I decided not to do sports in general but just ice hockey. So I started to get more involved with ice hockey during my time in Finland, which wasn’t really difficult because the Finns talk about ice hockey all the time. just like we talk about football, on the second day I went to an ice hockey game and I really enjoyed. it. I’ve actually never seen an ice hockey game in my life before. I actually don’t know that much about ice hockey, but I still have a few impressions of it now. The first thing I noticed is that the fans are much more peaceful to each other than our football fans. If there are two friends for different teams in Germany there is a lot of discussion and it would be unthinkable to go to a game together where the two teams play against each other. In Finland, things were completely different. To explain this in Tampere, where we were this week, there are two large teams that are both very good, which means the city is divided into two teams: Tappara and Ilves. On our penultimate day in Finland, these two teams played against each other and you actually saw a lot of fans with different. jerseys walking around together before and after the game. For example, there were two friends in the McDonalds together, one of Thema wearing an Ilves jersey and the other wearing a Tappara jersey this would been unthinkable here in Germany when it comes to football. So now I’ve already said a bit about the teams, so Tappara and Ilves are the two strongest teams in Tampere, they’re one of the best teams in all of Finland. I actually don’t really know anything more about ice hockey because we were only there for a week, but the thing with the fans was the most impressive thing for me because it’s so completely different in Germany.
By Hannah König