Day Harem (ha-rum – Day 3)

Two games down! So far so good.

Hockey News:
My first game was Hungary vs. Croatia. All of Hungary’s games are at night so they draw a pretty good crowd. I’d say a few hundred people. The fans here are unbelievable. They have air horns and these crazy noisemakers that sound like an animal is dying. So imagine you’re stuck in rush hour traffic with someone constantly beeping their horn. Now imagine several Duck Tours going by (those of you who live in Philly know what I mean). Now think about that lasting for 2 hours. In all actuality, it’s pretty exciting to skate in front of fans. The Hungarian fans have this cheer that goes, “We are, we are, Hungary” but their accents manage to make it rhyme. It sounds more like “We aah, we aah, hungaree-yah”. Also entertaining. One woman in the stands was blowing a whistle. Now, you might think she would realize when you blow a whistle at a sporting event where referees also use whistles that it might be confusing. She told the security she had just bought it special for our game to cheer.

My second game was also pretty good. Croatia vs. Korea. It went into overtime and a shootout and Korea actually won. It’s really interesting to see the different styles of play. Korea is very disciplined and technical, but they don’t really show any aggression which doesn’t bode too well for them in hockey. But other teams just go crazy all over the place with no idea of where they are supposed to be. So it’s an interesting mix. Some of the players speak English, some don’t. Some just pretend they don’t. But it makes communicating with them challenging and sometimes funny. You can explain things to them and they just stare blankly back at you.

In Other News, we all went to the supermarket and oohed aahed at all the different food. Mostly tons of meat and cheese. I bought some great pastries and water with no gas. For those of you who like drinking plain seltzer water all the time, you’ll fit in great here and should order your water “with gas”.

Today is our day off and we went on a tour of the hotel palace which is this fancy hotel from the 1930's that has a lot of history and then we went to a trout farm which, you might imagine, I thought was pretty cool. It was a family run farm in the middle of the mountains. They fed us huge chunks of smoked trout with paprika and wine. Not something I'd normally eat, but they say it's all about the experience.