I bumped into our neighbour yesterday and we ended up talking about ice-skating. Probably since this is the first time for loooong time that Brussels has had minus degrees (Celsius = below freezing point) for a week in a row. And for the 5 winters that we have lived here, it is the first time that the snow lasts for more than 6 hours without melting.
That means that the lumilyhty, the cover for the light made of snow balls, is still in good shape – just like the snow angel.
Back to the ice-skating;
The neighbour is British and he has – thanks to their lovely 5 years old daughter – gone ice-skating for the first time in his life. As said earlier, there is something strange about Brussels and skating since also I have skated here for the first time in my life. Well, I have some flash image in my head that I would have been on one rink at Lehtisaari, Finland but I must have been around 5-6 years or so…
With the British it is quite natural to live their life without skating, but me coming from Finland where the snow is part of your nature it is not. Also in school it is obligatory to skate as part of physical education, so you might wonder how I got by without skating. So do I. For some reason also my brother managed to do the same, but I can bet he had different motivators and excuses from mine.
I actually loved to play ice hockey and that’s what you do at winter time in Finland. Everyone has got a hockey stick and you play at the backyard, on streets, school yard which is converted into ice rink and everywhere you can. When we had a break during school day we raced down to the rink in order to reserve the goal for us and then we played there, but since it was during breaks we played on the ice with shoes instead of skates.
I don’t know how I got by at younger age but fact is I never got myself skates – at least not the right size… One thing is that my feet are the standard European Union size (47 or 14 in US size…) so it wasn’t easy to find skates and borrowing from friends was also out of question.
At middle school and high school I played basketball quite a lot and therefore tried to convince the teachers that it was better to let me practice b-ball inside and not to even talk about ice-skating – and with most teachers it worked. Particularly in high school we had a great personality as a teacher: Jussi Markkanen. He was a BIG basketball fan and also wanted the school team to succeed well. Hence he was perfectly fine with me staying inside shooting hoops instead of freezing my ass outside while others were skating. Great man, he gave me full marks to the graduation paper!
Anyways, I think it was our 3rd winter in Brussels and Finnish friends asked us to join them for ice-skating and so we did. I must have been mentally imbalanced or something since I also rented skates and tried it. It went surprisingly well and was fun so I right away decided to buy myself a pair of skates. However, since Belgium skate selection is quite small we bought new ones for the whole family when we visited Finland.
One year later I speak with my brother who also went through school years without skating and what does he tell me – due to his lovely daughter he has also started ice-skating…
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