Anecdotes and Moments...

For me the interesting parts of the trip and the experience come down to small moments. Interesting, ironic, funny, all of the little moments make the experience. Here are a few I remember.

Jenny (Hu Jie) is our translator on the trip and the representative of China Hockey. She sometimes has trouble especially with the idiomatic hockey terms, when listening and trying to understand me. The other day Coach Ji grabbed her to talk to me about some of the players as we had been trying a few different combinations on our third line. So, he began to speak to her in Chinese and she looked back at him with a classic blank stare. After about 10 minutes of talking back and forth with him, she still shook her head as she did not understand him, in Chinese. I am guessing he was using hockey terms she did not understand, but she had no idea what he was trying to say. He finally gave up looked directly at me, said a few names, used some gestures and Chinese words that I know, and in less than 2 minutes I got his point. A classic interpreter moment.

When I came to Harbin, one of the first things that I did was learn the girls names fairly quickly. This did not help Tim that much. Wang Linou, our captain, gave Tim 10 days to learn everyone’s name. It began to stress Tim out a bit as it got closer and she liked to tease him about the deadline. It was suggested that Tim would have to do the Plyometric training series that he put the girls through, if he could not get it. She would say “You must know all the names, or you will have to do some dryland training!” A couple days ago, and a day before the deadline, Tim went around the room and said all the names. He got them all right, with only a few pronunciation flaws, which makes all the girls laugh. As he was memorizing, he came up with a some things to help him here are two of my favorites. First our captain Wang Linou (Wong Lee New Uh) he calls Wally (new uh). The other is Yu Bai Wei (You Buy Way). When she says her name, her voice goes up at the end. So when Tim says it, he goes up on his tiptoes when he says the “way” part. It always makes her laugh. She is a very sweet kid, and young at only 17. Anyway, Tim has passed that hurdle, and now we both move on to learning more Chinese in Finland (cause where else would you learn it?)

Now for the day's recap:

Today we traveled to Piispala, which is in the middle of nowhere. We traveled about 3 hours, tured onto a dirt road, went past some cabins, along the lake the dirt road ended and we turned right into a state of the art hockey rink and swimming center. It was less than two years old and had a video replay screen in the rink. They even took video pictures of all the girls before the game and showed them for lineups, goals and penalties. The town of Piispala has about 1000 residents, but the nicest arena we have been in yet.

Piispala Rink and Video Screen

We played the Finnish Under 20 National Team, who were in training camp at Piispala. We lost 6-5. We got knocked around a little in the first as this was not an olympic sheet today. I would be surprised if it was even 80 feet wide. We battled back in the second and found ourselves on the wrong side of the penalty tally. We finished strong, but could not get the tying goal today. We need a little work on our defensive coverage and backchecking.

The bad news is a potential broken collar bone of our first line center Jin Feng Ling. We will find out tomorrow when she gets x-rays.

We finally have some time off to recuperate and work on some things. We do not play again until the LONG trip north to Oulu to face Karpat next weekend in a two game series.

Good night again from Finland! Check out the Finnish Zamboni!