How To Be A Canuck Fan in China
by GZ Expat on Apr 19, 2009 4:51 AM PDT
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PrintI love the expat life. I love the job...I love the cultural experiences we endure and learn from. I love the food...the weather. I don't love the crowds, nor the pollution. Every now and then you are surprised with the life that it brings you, like coming home and finding the neighborhood kids (Dutch, Danish, French, Filipino, American, Australian) in front of the house playing a hearty game of road hockey.
But there are challenges, and trying to follow my favorite team from 5,000 miles away has been an ongoing challenge for me the past 5 years. Here is a list of some of the challenges and triumphs that I find and use to get my addiction of Canuck hockey fed...
1. Time differences. It's 15 hours difference from China to the west coast of North America. But, instead of trying to do the math, I just subtract 3 hours from the clock and think of it as the opposite time of day, yesterday, back home. So, game time at 4pm for you on Sunday, is 7am on Monday morning.
2. Work can get in the way. When the Canucks play in GM Place, games start at 10 or 11 am here...making it difficult to concentrate on earning a living. When it does get in the way...this comes in handy...
3. Mobile Phone. Ahhh...the internet scoreboards. I've got the Canucks mobile site, TSN's mobile site and Yahoo's NHL mobile site bookmarked on my phone for instant score action. I can remember 2 years ago refreshing and refreshing my phone for hours during game 1 against the Stars...only to yelp YES! when the Canucks finally put one away to win it.
4. Team1040. Ahhh...thank god for the good people at Team 1040, not only for streaming the games, but posting podcast files of each period's call...as well as podcasts of their daily shows. I faithfully listen to Rick Ball and I get as much information I can out of those podcasts as anything.
5. Streaming. Yeah, there are some sites out there that stream the games live. Brutal for me, for the most part. China isn't known as a 'free' society and the Internet is tightly controlled. As such, everything flows through filters and servers that ensure only the 'good' stuff flows through. For instance, right now, YouTube is blocked here in China. As a result of the extra censorship, bandwidth is brutal. In addition, entire housing blocks and compounds are linked together with one line, with thousands of users on it. As the day progresses, bandwidth slows to a crawl. Game 2 was the first game that I was able to watch for an extended period of time...about half of it on a very grainy, jumpy picture. Reminded me of the old black and white TV's back in the day.
6. Friends. Gotta have friends and I have some pretty damn good ones that record and send me games when they can. Yeah, it takes a couple days to get them, but they are usually worth the wait (especially in HD). I've got a couple buddies here that have tried Slingbox too...but the afore mentioned bandwidth issues cause so many problems, its difficult to use here.
7. The web. In the old days, it was just NHL.com and Yahoo to keep me up to date...then I discovered Vancouver Canucks Op-Ed (now Canucks and Beyond) and began to build that database of blogs that I could access (Blogspot was blocked here for the longest time too).
8. Early drinking. Ahhh...it's terrible. Ever had a beer at 9am? It can be mighty tasty if the Canucks are winning after 2 periods.
9. Evening headache. But, it usually causes problems around dinnertime.
In short...just take some time to remember the folk all around the world that are dying to see, listen or just get a score update of Canuck games this playoff season. When you are sat on your sofa flipping from Center Ice to Versus to CBC...remember there are always alternatives. It can take some work...but if you love your team enough, it's more than worth it.
Hell, you never know...you can follow a team without really experiencing them from a distance, and still come up with observations like this and make yourself look pretty f*ing smart.
Go Canucks
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Ahh...I forgot this...
The last playoffs…the wife and I sat in the back garden of our house listening on TEAM1040…and Jeff Cowan scored.
Nice piece man, well done.
And bra power is slightly relevant since Cowen is playing for the Rivermen, the Blues AHL team.
'Nucks Misconduct - Housing Swedish Millionaires Since 2000.
I’m in China as well, but not really (Hong Kong). No internet issues for me. I like to compare now to my first years overseas (1997-2000). It’s night and day. Back then, there weren’t even streaming radio sites, the scores (if they made the Japanese papers) would be a day late, except the Stanley Cup. iESPN (the old Japanese ESPN) would show one or two games a week on a tape delay. WOWOW did some live ones. My sister would send me videos of the big games, a month late. Thankfully, those were the sucky Messier years… Now, I’ve got this site, streaming video (free if I so desire), torrent downloads of games, etc… Technology makes it almost like home… almost.
Ever had a beer at 9am?
Oh, I think that is a hell of an idea! Cheers!
That picture of those children, from so many different cultures, playing road hockey together, in your neighborhood, in China…
When I consider the stellar epic-ness of that image and what it conveys, it really is worth a thousand words.
I live in Japan, so I’m in a similar situation. With the time difference, watching live streams is generally not an option on weekdays. Here’s where bit torrent is my best friend. I’ve been able to download and watch good quality files of nearly every Canucks game this year, and watch them later in the evening or the next day. The trick is disciplining yourself not to check scores or information about the games, and forgetting that the game is long over when you’re actually watching it. It’s a bit of a lonely sphere, but it works.
"Your best better get a hell of a lot fucking better or you're gonna feel a hell of a lot fucking worse."
Great article. I am now living and working in South Korea and a lot of this really holds true. Luckily there is a little more success with streams here so I can watch the game. But yeah the playoffs usually happen during class so I have to sweat and anxiously wait until breaks to check the score. It is agony. I have not tried the download the game later bit as I lack the discipline. Technology has really helped though in keeping track of things.
NHL in China
I am in China as well.
I have a subscription online with NHL.com. It works well enough but there is some buffering at the highest resolution setting.
I bought a “Slingcatcher” which sends the video from my computer to my tv in another room. It works well as long as the video feed is there. I also watch other programming, including CBC’s “The National” on my tv.
Happy playoffs! Go Canucks!
By the way...
Where would those kids get their hockey sticks? I’d imagine they’d play soccer over there…
When I was a kid in HK, I used to play soccer everyday after school, there ain’t no hockey back then :P
We are all Canucks.
by Chinese Canuck on Apr 19, 2009 10:33 PM PDT reply actions
The sticks are mine…just the remnants that I had brought over with us when we moved. You can see a couple of them are really cut down short for my son when he was just a little tyke. I was able to score some new sticks from a friend of a friend of a friend who happened to have contacts at a stick factory…you gotta work all the angles here for survival.
I lived in Finland from 2001 to 2005. I got to watch a few games, one being the game 7 where Gelinas sunk us in OT (spit). What I did to survive was listen to NHL Radio, I could tune into CKNW (back then) and listen to it live.
I’m not sure if that would work, but it got me through those years. Anyways, cool post and good luck out there. I’m afraid that you’ll be scramblin for games for a while, cause we’re goin deep this year. I stake my VAST hockey knowledge on it.
1994 Playoff Run
In ’94 I was working in a small village in Northern China – only real time contact with the outside world was with the shortwave radio. CBC International gave us the latest on the Canadian arts scene (gee thanks) every morning. Desperately trying to find the results one morning I stumble across a BBC broadcast and there is Jim Robson providing a summary of the latest game! How sweet it was to hear that voice.
Slingbox,
Give it another try GZ, I piss off my wife most Friday and Saturday mornings with hockey on the slingbox, you eventually adjust to the “blur”, although to show how long I’ve been here (or the fact that I don’t come back in winter) I’ve never seen hockey on HD. Was actually looking forward to catching a game this Saturday i/o streaming 1040 at the office, but I guess I can live with no game 5!
On a sidenote however, I have just begun looking at the flight prices for late may …
Great Post
Living in Shanghai and have been listening to all the games on 1040 at work. Apart from listening there are tonnes of streams and P2P (u have to installed a little player) for you to watch all the games. They are only about 1-3mins delay depending on connections. From your blog name, I guess you are in Guangzhou. Too bad…..would love to meet up early this week for Round 2 against the Hawks…….and of course to have a beer or two.
I encourage you both to have beers when the games start (that’s the morning correct?). It’s cool, I left a note with both of your respective supervisors. They’re both cool with it.
'Nucks Misconduct - Housing Swedish Millionaires Since 2000.
by Yankee Canuck on Apr 28, 2009 6:19 PM PDT up reply actions
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