No curling and no Costas make Ian maintain sanity

The Winter Olympics are going on.

You wouldn't know that if you lived in Arenillas.

Last week, I tried to explain curling to my friend and he said, "Oh, I get it. It's like hockey."

I was impressed that he knew about hockey. Most people here have trouble fathoming the idea of snow. So to have sports that require snow is very difficult.

Suffice it to say, the Ecuadorian networks don't devote all of their primetime coverage (or any of it, for that matter) to the Olympics). That would take away from the telenovelas. And I'm pretty sure there might be a massive uprising if that happened.

So life goes on. I've realized that.

In the States, I would be glued to the TV, watching every moment of cross country skiing that I could, complaining about how CBC doesn't carry the games anymore, analyzing every slalom run, etc. In short, I'd be obsessed.

In Arenillas, nothing's different.

Last night, the US beat Canada in hockey. Momentous. I tried watching it streaming over the internet. I had some initial luck with a Spanish-language stream (listening to hockey in Spanish is hilarious - el arquero está parando en su cabeza), but once that one went my Russian and Finnish streams didn't pan out so well. Hockey is a difficult sport to watch when the picture isn't clear.

So I decided to read about it in the morning. If I were in the States, there's no way I would have done that for that for the ski jump portion of the nordic combined, let alone US hockey's biggest game since the 2002 gold medal game.

But being here, missing the Olympics doesn't bother me. I've missed a season of Tigers baseball and Michigan football. And look, the sun still rises.

And the fact that I'm missing the country's once-every-four-years obsession with curling, that's another story altogether.