By Philip DiDio

European vacations inspire dreams of cathedrals, museums, Mediterranean beaches, speedy train rides arriving on schedules defined by 24 hour clocks. It’s the Europe of the Mission Impossible and Bourne movie cycles. My Europe evokes a trip upstate to Lake Country; A summer camp with battered rowboats, fat-tired bicycles and family cookouts.

Summer in Finland has the charm of an escape to nature, with the appeal of 24-hour daylight and a festive populace thawed and reanimated out of their September to May deep freeze. The joys of reuniting with our Finnish friends & cousins taper after a week. After ten years of annual visits, one scrambles for things to do.

One year I rediscovered Finnish baseball – known as “pesäpallo” or “boboll” to natives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pes%C3%A4pallo

Finnish baseball is an invention, a young sport blending elements of baseball, boot camp and the Indianapolis 500. It’s baseball, it’s Finnish. Hey, it’s Finnish baseball!

After WWI an emissary from the Finnish army returned from a trip to the US with the mad genius to tweak baseball’s rules to meet military specifications.

http://www.pesis.fi/pesapalloliitto/international_site/introduction_to_the_game/

Eighty years later the game lives in schoolyards and in professional leagues that capture the imagination of farmers, factory workers and summer lovers in Finland’s rural heartland.

For live action, I planned my trip by sticking a pin in a map. The closest team to my Finnish home was in Vimpeli, a 100km drive on a two-lane highway through a quiet forested area that resembles just about everywhere in Finland.

http://www.superpesis.fi/pesistv

Learning about the game can be challenging for a foreigner. Steeped in cosmopolitan pursuits like architecture, fine glassware & interior design, Finland’s elite entertain visitors with tales of high culture in four or more languages. Such people are not experts in Finnish baseball. Finnish baseball buffs are factory workers, farmers and deliverymen.

My buddy at the game was a formerly Asia-based Nokia executive, returned to his way-north hometown to windsurf on ice and plot his next career. Schooled at Finland’s finest universities, Timo could explain the inner workings of an automobile, dissect a cellphone, build his own hi-tech home and speak four languages. But when asked some simple questions about the batting order, the manager’s signs and scoreboard figures, he equivocated, “It’s been a while since I played pesäpallo in school, perhaps you should ask someone else.”

That brought up a whole new set of complications. Approaching strangers in Finland is a challenge. Finns generally recoil from unscripted social situations, preferring silence to a spontaneous encounter. My quest to discover this familiar but foreign game continued.