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The Dallas Stars and Florida Panthers have taken a break from their North American portion of the NHL schedule to play two games at Nokia Arena in Tampere for the 2024 NHL Global Series Finland presented by Fastenal. The games are Friday and Saturday.

Stars defenseman Esa Lindell will be keeping a blog this week with NHL.com throughout the Global Series, giving fans a taste of what life is like on the ground as they go through the experience in Finland. His first entry was written soon after the Stars landed in his hometown of Helsinki on Monday afternoon after a delayed overnight flight from Dallas.

We are finally here.

When going overseas, the travel is always long. It’s a long time for me to get home from Dallas, plus this time we had the delay at the airport. That’s probably the longest I have been on a plane in a long time.

But it’s OK. When you travel a lot, you get used to it and there are so many options to pass the time. I like to watch movies or series on Netflix, but I tried to sleep a lot, most of the guys did. It made the trip go by faster, I think. Plus, it gave the guys a lot of time to just hang out and chill and have a few laughs. Everyone was in a good mood by the time we got here.

Now, we are here, and I am super excited to be in my hometown and to show the boys some Finnish experiences and culture.

We are going to start right away. We are on our way to the bus right now to go for a traditional Finnish sauna and then go out for dinner and see if we can get the boys to try some of the local dishes.

Sauna is a huge part of life in Finland. It is very important. For me, it’s a way to relax and put behind what happened in the day, your work or whatever. You can relax and sweat it out a bit. Traditionally, it calms me down and helps you fall asleep.

We have some other things planned in Helsinki as well before we go to Tampere later this week. For me, Roope Hintz and Miro Heiskanen, we pretty much decided together on all the excursions and events. Nobody had a real specific thing they wanted to do, so we figured it all out as a group and I’m excited to get started.

Tomorrow, we will practice and get back on the ice. Then, we have some other fun stuff planned.

Check in soon.