Hockey Night in Thailand - Making Frenemies

Scandinavians and Canadians normally get along quite well. In fact we have made some nice new Swedish friends at Salad Hut - Mats and Nina and their two cute little guys Ted and Sam.

Mats with Owen - UP....

....UP....

....and AWAAAAY!!

A few meals together and playtime at the pool have been enjoyable for all. They are very nice people. But with the gold medal on the line, how long could this nascent friendship last? Could it survive the incompatible thrill of victory....

and agony of defeat? 

As Sunday arrived and the faceoff time drew nearer, we began to hurriedly attempt to secure a suitable viewing location for the big game, knowing of course that we would be vastly outnumbered by the viking crowd.

But it soon became evident that the Thais actually are not that interested in ice hockey (or any winter sport for that matter) and no local establishment had remembered to subscribe to an Olympic feed. There were rumours that a bar about 10 km away might be showing the game, but no guarantee. We might be out of luck. Crisis mode !!

This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you've got a moment, it's a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying "This Is A Large Crisis"

We weren't sure what do to - the idea of finding a taxi-truck to transport the four of us across the island somewhere to watch the game in a sea of yellow and blue clad (with a tinge of sunburn red) Swedes, didn't really appeal to us. Not a good crowd to be in if Canada wins, and even worse if Canada loses.

So I tried to see if we could watch the game on my laptop.

Now for those of you who have tried to stream video outside the country from where the feed is originating, you may be familiar with the message "sorry, this video is unavailable from your location". Well it looks something like this. Scratch that, exactly like this...

And most people can probably figure out a workaround with a dummy IP address, but with only 15 minutes until the puck dropped I was in a bit of a jam - then I discovered that an add-on to Google Chrome called Hola can be downloaded to bypass to the restrictions and presto! we had the game.

The only downside was the fact that about every 30 seconds the streaming just froze up - with this annoying orange circle. 

We would then have to wait about 5 seconds for play to continue.

So although not ideal viewing conditions (11 inch screen and the orange circle of torture) we watched the Canadians completely dominate for 4 hours (that's how long it takes to watch a game when it freezes every 30 seconds). Another Gold Medal moment!!

Nina was a good sport about the whole thing - I tried to keep my little victory dance to under 5 minutes and she managed a smile for our last photo.

So looking back over the last two Winter Olympic Games, it seems a pattern has begun to emerge. When the Boltwoods are in a warm tropical Asian destination (Langkawi, Malaysia in 2010 and Koh Phangan, Thailand in 2014), the Canadians win the gold. So....

....who am I to mess with success - in 2018 where should we go?