Back from AEM!

Hi all!

Just got back home from the LAN trip and after getting some sleep on the plane and train found myself in a good enough shape to do some writing. So here is a journal with some stories from the trip:

Day 1 (Wednesday):

Took a train to Tampere, met Iron there and later on all the other LAN attending Finns (except for Thomm, who I met on the next day) + ENSAM. We were chilling out at Iron's place and having some drinks before heading out to a couple bars with some chicks toMi had met earlier. Getting into a bar wasn't easy for everyone tho as miNd was already too drunk and got thrown out immediately followed by ENSAM later on. ENSAM went home and miNd disappeared, but the rest continued to a "night club" with 1€ beers, which is something you don't get very often in Finland! After the club closed most of us went back to Iron's place and later on found miNd aswell who had thought he was at Helsinki and was trying to get a cab to Tampere (where he already was).

Day 2 (Thursday):

We had an early flight to catch after getting like 2 hours of sleep, but it went surprisingly good and got some additional sleep during the flight. On Bremen we split up with toMi, miNd and Thomm who convinced some random Finn from the same flight to travel to Enschede with them. Atleast owzo was still convinced on Sunday evening that it was toMi's mate t0psu or some other Finnish ET player, but he definitely wasn't. With fin6 guys we had decided to book an apartment from Bremen instead and stay there for the night. Despite Iron's comment "tänään vedetään!" (= "lets get wasted tonight!") I ended up being the only guy getting properly started with drinking at the apartment, but we still decided to go out for "a drink or two" with everyone else except for Salaneuvos who decided to get some sleep. After meeting up with some random locals on the street we went to some sort of bar in an apartment over there with some band playing. Drinks were fucking cheap and the atmosphere was really relaxed! The others started to get drunk aswell and had a good time there.

Day 3 (Friday):

Our day started with checking out from the apartment before 10:00 AM, getting to the train station and buying tickets to Enschede. We decided to go for the cheap option (20€ / person) with 3 changes on the way so it took some time until we finally arrived at Enschede. At Enschede we checked in to Eden (hotel) and headed up to the LAN center to meet up with all the other people. Some guys were boot camping over there and some were more concentranted on the drinking part. Had a couple drinks and met up with a lot people and was great to see all the guys I had met up with before and some of the new faces aswell of course! Also ended up doing some interview stuff along with miNd and toMi who were already (unexpectedly) properly wasted when we met them. Not sure if they're already up somewhere or if they are ever going to be uploaded, which I guess would be understandable due to quality of the interviews I was part of atleast.

Day 4 (Saturday):

First day of the actual tournament. Luckily we had gotten into a group that started the games at 16:00 CET so we had some time to gather ourselves and the games ended up in time for us to get back on the drinking part again. Our group wasn't too hard and I guess there's not much to mention about the group stage games, but it was good to get used to the LAN atmosphere again and I'd guess important for the first timers in our team ( Jewe and Salaneuvos). After the games we were just chilling out at the venue for rest of the evening, chatting up with other players and speccing some games.

Day 5 (Sunday):

Had an early wakeup as our first game was already starting at 10:00 AM and took some effort to get everyone out of the bed that early. First of the playoff games were really horrible from my part as I was feeling fucking awful and couldn't really get anything down my throat yet. After the games against NBS and PDEG had some sleep at the venue and had to down a couple beers to get into a reasonable shape again. That really helped and rest of the games I'm happy about my own performance. As a team I'd say that our tournament went really like we expected. Perhaps we could've been a bit stronger not losing any maps to other teams than Anexis, but after all Anexis was the only team that was better than us and there wasn't anything we could do about that. The games were running really late and so we couldn't catch a train to Bremen on Sunday anymore like we had planned to, but instead had drinks with the guys who still were hanging out at the venue. Then we headed to Logica where we had no room and were supposed to sleep on the floor. In the end we didn't really get any sleep though, mostly thanks to herbal.

Day 6 (Monday):

Walking like a group of zombies we headed out to the train station and started our journey back to Bremen. As we arrived to Bremen we decided to just head out to the airport and hang out there for the remaining 13 hours or so before our flight. Everyone had a massive hangover, drank some non-alcoholic drinks and were trying to get as much sleep as they could. Not too much to write about!

Day 7 (Tuesday):

Flew back to Finland, had some food to eat and took a train back to my home city.

Overall was an excellent trip as always! Huge thanks to the admins, WZZRD staff and everyone else who made the event possible. My shoutout list of all the great people I had the pleasure to meet and talk with would be so long that I hope everyone who do deserve the shoutout from me know who they are!

Pictures/videos from the trip will probably follow later.

See you at the next LAN!