Visitors from Finland, it's been busy weekend

We had visitors from Finland over this weekend.
I was contacted a few weeks ago by Teemu, as he was looking to buy pinball machines for sale in Belgium and the Netherlands and wanted some help finding them. Later Ari contacted me too, as he was going to go together with Teemu on this road trip.

This was great news. I had already contact by mail and on irc (#pinball) with Ari about 10 years ago. So I was looking forward to meeting him after all these years.
He's well known in Finland, he's a good player, and has a large website about pinball: apz.fi. (unfortunately almost completely in finnish)

Friday they arrived, we met and we already played some pinball.

Saturday we visited a pinball dealer here in Belgium where we filled their van completely :) Seeing five Medieval Madness pinball machines next to each other was impressive for all of us.
Later Peter from gamebunker.be joined us. The evening was spent in the historic city of Antwerp (you need to do some sightseeing and taste belgian beer), and we even played.. guess what, pinball.
Then we went to some bars in search of a bingo machine.. unfortunately in the first 2 bars we found that had them, all machines were occupied. So we played some Stern Iron Man pinball instead.

Finally we did find a bar with a bingo machine. Ari really wanted to play this type of machine on location..
After having watched people lose over 100 euro whilst we were playing a few games of pinball, we all were curious how well Ari would do.

Well he had been training at home, and said playing pinball had learnt him how to nudge a game skillfully. He put a bit over 2 euro in.. and in the end won 22 euro !
My task was to convince the bar owner to pay us out. After needing to buy another drink he did give us a 20 euro bill. Not bad! Getting 1000% return on your investment isn't bad for 15 minutes of work..
Although it probably won't work every time;. but still, he did much better than some guys we saw losing over 100 euro in those bingo machines..

Maybe this is what pinball needs to become successful again: all the people that are addicted to bingo machines, in the hope to win some money. You're doing it wrong !
Bingo is a gambling game, but your skill can influence it a bit.
First learn to play pinball very well, and use the skills you learnt to earn money on bingo machines.

Sunday we all went to the yearly open air jukebox show in Rosmalen. We visit this show every year.
There were not a lot of pinball machines, even less jukeboxes than previous years. More rock&roll, rockabilly, .. I didn't buy a lot, just a manual for Funhouse and Orbitor One. I'm especially happy with the O1 manual (even it's german) as the game is rare and finding a manual for it is also not easy.. (I only had a bad photocopy of the german manual). Also met some people there that we see every year at the show..

In the afternoon we had to say goodbye as our visitors had to start their long trip back home..

Over the years we've already had some other pinball visitors from abroad at our house (Germany, Poland, Netherlands, United Kingdom), but Ari and Teemu from Finland came from the most far away..