It is a dark evening in late October, as every evening is at this time of year. The only two types of weather there seem to be are ‘overcast’, and ‘overcast with drizzle’. Which is fine during the day, but at night, no moon and no stars means that it’s oppressively dark. A glowing, screeching tube approaches from the east. The brand-new tram line 15 had opened just the day before, and already people are hating it, given its apparent inability to navigate corners without causing hearing damage. Wanting to form my own opinion on it, however, I had decided to ride it this evening for the first time, as it was going in roughly the direction I was headed. Inside, I feel like I stepped into a different world. Impressive sound insulation, and the contrast of the brightly lit interior versus the black night, make it seem like the outside ceases to exist. For me, however, this is unfortunate, since I am trying to find my way to a small village northwest of Aalto and Google Maps had just in this moment decided to be very confused about what was going on.

To be fair, the new tram line makes up for not being registered in Google Maps by taking excessive amounts of time to get anywhere. This gives the passenger sufficient time to figure out a route on their own. I spend the next ten minutes frantically switching between different map apps and periodically looking up to see if a station starting with ‘L’ was up next, which I think might be the letter my transfer stop starts with. As a foreigner, this is common practice, since there is no chance of remembering more than the first letter of a Finnish word. I switch trains at a promising stop, which turns out to be, of course, a massive shopping center. Using the excessive signage, I locate a connecting train, which takes me to a village called Kauniainen. Here, a guy, who had contacted be on WhatsApp earlier that day, picks me up with his car. Apparently, the last part would be ‘a bit tricky’.

We drive to a clearing in the middle of the woods, unpaved, pitch black, a steep hill on one side. The hill has a door. We enter through it to find a massive tunnel, wide and tall enough for a couple of busses to pass each other. The walls and ceiling are rough-cut rock, spray-painted white, and a line of lights hangs from the ceiling, brightly illuminating the interior. We walk down the tunnel for five minutes and enter a cavern through a set of blast-proof doors. The space around the edge of the cavern is divided into rectangular rooms by bare white walls, forming a strange contrast to the rough, natural-looking cave wall. Some rooms have windows, and I see storage space, a conference room, a trophy cabinet. In a second, connected cave, there is a small wooden hut, which would look perfectly at home on some alpine mountaintop. It sells coffee and snacks, which one can enjoy on a set of log benches. But the absurdity of this place reaches a new level as we enter a final cavern and find ourselves in an arena.

The Kauniainen ball-hall is one of 50.000 civil shelters in Finland, designed to protect almost the entire Finnish population from natural disasters, bombings, chemical, or nuclear attacks. This is part of a policy implemented after the second World War, where every major building or center of population must come with an appropriate shelter. But unlike what one might expect from a bunker, these structures are spacious, clean, warm, and comfortable. And they typically have non-emergency uses as well. Besides sports centers, one might find something as mundane as a parking lot or metro station, but sometimes something more interesting like a swimming pool or a Santa-themed amusement park. In the Kauniainen shelter, one plays handball.

Handball, with which I mean the team sport played on a 40m x 20m court with a goal on either end, is a huge sport in Germany. There are dozens of amateur teams spread across four divisions in my home region of Heidelberg alone. I had played the sport for sixteen years and it was a big part of my life, so I was not about to quit just because I happened to move to a different country. However, as I found out, handball in Finland is almost non-existent. Some googling told me that in the entirety of the country, there are fewer teams than in Heidelberg. Interestingly, the few handball teams that do exist are almost entirely made up of the Swedish-speaking minority, which makes up around five percent of Finns. Indeed, Kauniainen has a handball club due an untypically large fraction of 30% of its 10.000 inhabitants being Swedish-speaking. It was the reason I had spent the last hour trying to get here.

I look around the cavern with its rough-cut walls, ventilation pipes snaking along the edges, lights hanging loosely from the ceiling, and less seating than what my former 9th tier club in Germany has. This bunker under a hill outside a small village near Espoo, is the home of a Finnish first-division handball team.