Friday April 18 2008

Frrrrkkk! Prrrrrppp! Screecckkk! Our plane touched down on Finnish tarmac, lights pinging back on and wheels making a noise I don’t know how to write. It had been a windy descent, so when a triumphant fanfare played over the Tannoy, the passengers cheered. The trumpets seemed to be a recognition that we were all in this bumpy flight together, and that, hooray, we had all made it one piece. The cheering promptly stopped when the voiceover kicked in: “Another flight arrives on time with Ryanair… Europe’s most punctual airline.” We weren’t all in this together after all. It was just an ad.

Then again, this was the Internet, land of false impressions and pop-ups. Congratulations! You’re the one millionth person to see this banner! Click here to install our free virus software! You’d be forgiven for getting excited.

However, the Internet wasn’t quite what we had been expecting. What we’d seen of it in films had prepared us for something more intimidating, but evidently Hollywood had missed the mark. We certainly hadn’t been sucked into a hallucinogenic realm of interconnected computer-generated pipelines and grids, as The Lawnmower Man had suggested we might. And if there were any vast, apocalyptic hives of sedated humans being harvested by spider-like robots, Matrix fashion, they were out of eyeshot of the runway. There wasn’t even anybody on a skateboard, meaning Hackers was wrong too.

So we had arrived in Tampere, Finland, the Internet. Awaiting us was a man named Iscaria. He and Brodos had become good friends over time, and I had known him as long as I had known anyone online. That was a comfort, but it also meant there was more to live up to. What if he hated us? What if we hated him? What if my work colleagues’ belief came true, that the kind of person who would willingly drive three hours to collect a pair of strange Englishmen was probably also the kind of person who enjoyed cooking and eating human penises?

For those who have never tried it, it is initially weird meeting a very familiar yet unknown face in real life. The moment you clamp eyes on them, years of established relationship are potentially overwritten. It’s safe and cosy when all you know of somebody is text and pixels. It doesn’t matter if they smell, if they drool, if they look like their face was run over by a tractor when they were three years old, because you’d never know.

Voice chat presents similar dangers. If you’ve spent months getting to know a stubborn, decisive and authoritative character through text alone, it’s off-putting to discover he has the voice of a camp French toddler. But meeting up with someone truly magnifies this threat. Once you’ve encountered their true form, it’s impossible to see the pixels without the tractor wound.

Fortunately, Iscaria turned out to be normal. This was a great relief all round.

We had been slightly concerned that he wasn’t going to meet us. Our pitiful attempts at planning had left him largely unaware of our arrival time, and his worrying online absence in the days preceding the flight meant all we could do to contact him was to leave details on the website and ask others to relay the information while we travelled. There was also uncertainty over whether he had actually told his parents they would be hosting a pair foreign nerds for a weekend. If we had grounds to fear we might be straying into the trap of an internet penis cannibal, they certainly had them too. Personally, I already had suspicions about Brodos.

But there was Iscaria, dutifully waiting on an uncomfortable seat in the world’s smallest airport arrival lounge. He looked tired, tall and Finnish. We took some photos to record this and got into his car.

Three hours is a long drive in any country, but this holds especially true on the main roads of Finland. It's no use looking at your surroundings to inspire conversation - the best you can come up with is: “That place has a very long name,” or: “Oh look, another tree”. Luckily Brodos kept our spirits up by minutely detailing the origins of almost every character in the Marvel comic universe. This was surprisingly entertaining and I learned a lot of important things about avoiding toxic waste.

We arrived at Iscaria's home in Kuopio and collapsed in our allocated quarters, Brodos claiming a top bunk large enough to house a small orchestra and me claiming a ground level bed large enough to house a fat child. As you may have deduced from the photos, that was perfect.