NS meeting in Finland 2010!

Hi there. This is my story of the NS meeting 2010 in Rastila camping in Helsinki.

Friday, June 9th

Prologue: Meeting Doogie

I arrived at Pasila, near Helsinki somewhere around midday on Friday after roughly two hour train ride from Tampere. At Pasila, I met my old buddy Vision and also the Spanish NS Meet mercenary Doogie. We dumped my stuff at Vision's flat and met the NS Meet organiser Syntax of Limbo there. At Vision's flat we loaded Limbo's car with some reindeer meat for barbeque and some gear for music playback and headed to Rastila camping site, located at Vuosaari island.

Cabin at the wonderful Rastila camping site.

Day 1: Friday

Meeting the folks, Barbeque, Volleyball, Helsinki Nightlife

At Rastila we were greeted by most of the meet participants. Even the famous Oulu Mafia had already arrived after 675 km drive from their home town and had already had a sauna in Rastila. The Oulu convoy of Koira!!1, Rapsutin and Jiriki had also picked up Tane from Jyväskylä, so we were fielding lineup from all over the Finland and Spain already.

After some handshakes and casual chat we left the sauna cottage for the barbeque shelter. Syntax had cooked some wonderful, delicious marinaded steaks and we also had tons of grill sausage and Vision's reindeer meat. Being Finns we also had some beer to go with all that.

From left: Syntax of Limbo, Doogie, Amagai, Garo. Afasia hiding behind Garo.

Syntax' delicious marinaded steaks getting barbequed! Rapsutin lurking on the background.

The meet in progress.

Later on while barbequing we encoutered some random teenage girls, who obviously were impressed by our exotic Spanish foreigner. Then again there were also a few uncomfortable silences when they asked us how the meet folks know each other. Playing NS doesn't make a good pickup line, I guess.

Rapsutin had brought a volleyball and there was a net right next to the barbeque shelter, so the barbeque slowly escalated into a NS joke ridden volley ball game. We had great time, although the girls kept interrupting Amagai's game more than enough. Amagai didn't seem to mind though.

Koira!!1 in the heat of a beachvolley match.

The volleyball and bbq went on for a while. Later on IsoK, another gamer from Oulu arrived at Rastila and it was time for the group photo.

Setting up for the group photo. Since we were all NSPlayers, any kind of team coordination is obviously impossible.

After the group pic it was time to visit Helsinki nightlife. We missed our table reservation by a few hours and had to walk around the corner to get some pizzas and beer, but everyone seemed to have great time. Later on we proceeded to some more clubbing. Somewhere around 4 A.M people scattered around to their homes and to Rastila.

Having beers while waiting for the pizzas:

Day 2: Saturday

Music Quiz, Gaming Cafe Raid, Soccer, Gift for Doogie

Saturday morning was quiet. People were weary of the last night and nobody had any particular plan for the day. We barbequed some more, chatted about random stuff and had a humorous music quiz with some NS2 keys as prize. The Oulu lineup had some hilarious chatter going on and everyone seemed to be well on their way on recovering from last night's experience.

Looking a bit tired early on on Saturday.

At some point in the afternoon we decided to raid the local Gaming Cafe with NS LAN. It took us quite a while to get the NSes installed and running on ~15 computers, but eventually we managed to have a couple of 6 vs 6 rounds. Occassionally you could hear people raging and laughing at their unfamiliar NS settings, keyboards and mouses, but once again the mood was really upbeat and positive. I, as commander, accidentally spammed more obses than medpacks due to the huge saitek keyboard with extremely weird key layout and a round later I could see Mulk doing the exact same thing right on the next computer.

Jiriki and Doogie looking focused on the gaming cafe.

It was already turning late when got out of the gaming cafe and we decided to settle for a nearby pub to watch the evening Soccer WC bronze match. During the game, the NS Meet people signed and decorated a flag and gave it to Doogie as a NS Meet souvenir.

After the match people started to creep back to their homes and Rastila. We said goodbye to the Oulu folks, who were leaving early next morning. Most of the meet disbanded for the last time.

Epilogue

Sunday:

Walking around the City, More Soccer.

Most of the meet had fled to their homes on Sunday, but Doogie was still staying at Syntax' place and I was staying at Vision's flat, so we gathered up a small group to explore the city. Most of the day Aleksi, Doogie, Syntax and me wandered around, talked about random stuff and tried to take pictures of any NS related words on the city streets.

This obviously had to be done in a NS meet:

In the evening Doogie understandably wanted to see the soccer world cup final and we headed to a local sports pub. We stood 4 hours in the overcrowded pub in exhausting heat and cheered for Spain. I don't think it gets much more intense with soccer here in Finland. Afterwards Doogie was obviously happy with the result.

Score: 0-0. At this point Doogie wasn't too amused

After the game we headed to another pub for one more beer and then spread out. It took me a few calls to wake up Vision and get him open the door, but it didn't matter too much :)

Monday

More walk in the city, heading back home.

One more day of wandering around in the city. In the evening I said goodbyes to the remaining participants and head to the railway station and Tampere.

Some more decent pictures from Sunday and Monday:

From left: Syntax, Vision and Doogie.

From left: Aleksi, Doogie and me.

Finally, I'd like to thank Syntax of Limbo for doing a huge effort on organising the awesome meet, Doogie for coming all the way from Spain, Vision for letting me stay at his flat and all the people who participated and essentially made this the meet it was. Thank you.

Also huge thanks to everyone who took photos and to Oma for helping out with the banner, without you the article could have never been like this.

Also, I strongly recommend you to check out more pictures from the meet.

... And Syntax' photo slideshow of his pictures. He also took some videos from the gaming cafe, sports pub and Saturday barbeque.

-Bacillus

P.S. If you've got uploaded NSmeet content somewhere, drop me a message and I'll add the link to the article. Also if you for some reason want your picture removed from the article, go ahead and tell me to do so. The article is in no way meant to offend anyone.

P.P.S. The article comment box is pretty limited when it comes to any longer stories, so it's probably easier to discuss the meet more on the forums. The aftermath thread.