If you’re new to the bonus episode series, let me quickly explain what it’s all about. In this series, I just tell you some stories from my everyday life. I’m a Canadian person but I’m currently living abroad in South Korea, and I hope that by listening to my everyday stories about what I’ve been up to or what I’m thinking about, something like that, I hope that you will be able to B.I.G.B by listening to these stories.

So, B.I.G.B is our motto for the series and it’s an acronym. It has a meaning behind it. The meaning is “B” stands for build your English fluency. The “I” means increase your cultural knowledge and cultural understanding of the culture of English-speaking people. The “G” means grow your vocabulary.

And the final “B” is become a better and a clearer communicator in English. So, if those are your goals, then you’re here in the right place. And for every bonus episode that we make here at Culips, there is an absolutely 100% free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary and you can get those just by following the link that’s in the description for this episode.

And if you’re a Culips member, then you’ll also get a comprehension quiz. So, if you’d like to sign up and become a Culips member and get all of the amazing bonuses and extras and exclusive English learning study tools that you will get if you are a member, then you can just visit our website, Culips.com, learn all about it.

Sign up if you’d like. And we’ll also put a link in the description for this episode so you could just follow that link as well. It’s really up to you. Now I have an announcement to make here at the start of the episode and that is to all Culips members. If you are a Culips member, guys, I have exciting, great news.

That is in June, at the start of June 2024, just in case you’re listening to this episode way in the future, OK, June 2024. We are launching this amazing new service, I think, and we are giving it away free to all Culips members. It will be small-group conversation sessions.

So, this is something that we’ve heard from so many members over the years, feedback about this is that you guys would like a place to practice English speaking. Of course, you can get lots and lots of English listening practice in by listening to our podcast, but speaking, it’s not as easy to get that practice in.

So, we hear you loud and clear and we have created this program to help you achieve that goal. So, what it is is that we are going to be hosting small group conversation sessions each and every week. In fact, we will have two or three sessions happening each week. One of them will be hosted by me.

One of them will be hosted by, well, one of our two study guide writers, Alina, or Indiana. The idea is that you will join the conversation session and you will be placed into a small group with other Culips members and we’re going to give you discussion questions to talk about that are linked to one of the recent Culips episodes that we’ve published.

So, I think it’s great. You’ll be able to listen to the episode first, get yourself comfortable with the topic, understand the topic, and probably if you’re like me, like when I listen to a podcast, I always have my own ideas and opinions that are running through my head as I’m listening, and I’m sure you are the same way.

You’re probably listening to Culips and thinking in your head about how you would answer that question or what your opinion about the topic is. So, this will give you an opportunity to verbalize, to speak, to share your opinion, to share your thoughts with other Culips members. So, the classes will be happening on Zoom, OK?

That is the way that people from around the world can easily meet at the same time in the same place. So, there’ll be happening on Zoom and there will be different times for different people from around the world. So, I think Indiana, she is based out of the Eastern part of the United States.

She’ll be doing them in the evening her time, Alina will be doing them in the evening her time and she lives in Ireland. So, she is in the Irish time zone. Of course, I’m based out of Seoul. I’ll be doing them in the evening my time.

So, it really depends like where you live in the world, where you’re located, but Culips members can just log on to the Culips.com website, go to the member dashboard, and you’ll be able to see a schedule there. And also, there is a time zone chooser.

So, you should select your time zone and you will be able to see the classes when they will be happening in your local time zone. So, I think this is awesome. It’s kind of an organized way to practice speaking English and to practice talking about in more detail what you listen to on Culips.

So, if you’re a Culips member already, like I said, guys, these are free for you, and we hope that you will take advantage of them and that this will be a really popular program going into the future.

And if you’re not a Culips member yet, you can sign up now and then you will be able to join as many of these sessions as you would like, really. For now, we’re having no limits for the starts. You can just take as many of the sessions as you would like to.

So, if you would like to become a member and join us for these small-group conversation sessions, then yeah, you know what to do. Visit our website, Culips.com, and you can sign up and become a member today. OK, let’s get started with my main story for this week.

In fact, it’s a little bit of a follow-up from last week’s episode because in last week’s episode, which was called “Wild May,” if you haven’t heard that episode yet, check it out. It’s an interesting one. But in that episode, I was just talking about all of the things that I’ve been up to in this month of May.

And I’m recording right now at the very, very end of May, probably by the time you are listening to this episode, May will be completely finished and over. But I did write some things in my notebook in preparation for last week’s episode that I just didn’t have time to talk about.

So, I’m going to talk about two things that were remaining in my notebook that I didn’t have time to talk about last week, but finally, I do have some time here today to talk about. So that’s what I’m going to do.

So, the first thing that I wrote in my notebook, and guys, I have to say, both of these things are about sports. So, I hope that’s all right with you, but I’ll try not to make it too focused on sports and just more of an interesting story to listen to.

So, two sports stories for you. The first one, as I was saying, is ice hockey, ice hockey. I wrote down ice hockey in my notebook. And the reason that I wanted to talk to you about ice hockey is, A) it is my favorite sport.

I love watching ice hockey as a good Canadian guy, right? And Canadians, we think this is our sport. I know not too many countries play ice hockey. It’s really just North America and some parts of Northern Europe, pretty much. That’s where it’s popular and other parts of the world.

Of course, it’s probably a global sport. Even when I was in Australia a few months ago, I noticed that there was an ice hockey arena and an ice hockey program close to where I was staying at my Airbnb, actually. So, I thought that was pretty amazing that they had this ice hockey facility in Australia.

So of course, it is a global sport and people from around the world play it, but really only popular in Northern Europe and North America, I think. So, my favorite sport. I love watching it. It’s very exciting. It’s a very fast-paced game. It’s brutal. It’s physical. And yeah, there are so many things I like about ice hockey.

If you’re a longtime listener of Culips, then you’ll know that my favorite ice hockey team is the Vancouver Canucks. The Vancouver Canucks are the team that is located closest to my hometown in Kelowna, British Columbia. They’re also in my home province of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Kelowna, BC.

So, I guess just naturally because of geography, I came to love this team and I’ve been a fan ever since I was a little elementary school kid, ever since I can remember. However, there were some years in the middle from about high school until I finished university where I didn’t really care too much about the Canucks at all because I was more interested in music and focused on music.

And at that time, I thought sports were rather silly and stupid. So, I gave up on the team for a while and now I’ve come full circle. To come full circle means to like something or to do something and then not do it and then return to it again. So, you’ve kind of completed a full 360-degree rotation. So, I guess I’ve come full circle.

I started liking the Canucks a lot when I was a kid, then I didn’t like them so much when I was university age and then now that I’m an adult, I’m back on team Canucks and I’m a big fan. So, I’ve gone full circle and I guess maybe I’ve grown a little bit because now I enjoy sports and I still enjoy music.

When I was younger, I was like only into music and I thought sports were stupid. So anyways, Vancouver Canucks. The reason that I wrote them down in my notebook is that the National Hockey League, the NHL, is currently doing their playoff series right now.

So, every season, we call it an ice hockey season, it starts in the fall, and it goes until the spring and during the regular season, that’s what we call it, the regular season, there are 82 hockey games. So, there are 32 teams in the league and each team plays 82 games. It’s a lot of hockey, which for a fan like me is awesome, it’s exciting.

I watched most of the games this year, incredibly. I think there were only a couple of games that I didn’t see, so I spent a lot of time watching the team and following the team this year. To be honest, some of the games I skipped through rather quickly. A lot of the games happen in the morning when I can’t watch them.

It’s nice on the weekend when they happen in the morning, and I can catch the game on like a Saturday morning or Sunday morning. Love that, but most days I’m too busy to watch the games live, so instead I would watch them back. I have this premium subscription to the NHL Network’s global package, I guess it’s called.

And it’s specifically designed for people who don’t live in North America and it’s great. It’s super good, it’s such a great deal compared to what you get if you do live in North America.

Then this package is rather expensive and there are all these restrictions and stuff, but because the game is not too popular outside of North America, then for a really affordable fee, you can watch all of the games. They are available for playback, so you can watch them back.

There’s no commercials, it’s really quite cool. I would spend a lot of time just flipping through the games, not watching the whole thing, but any time there was a break in play, or an intermission break during the periods, then I could just fast forward and skip through. I could watch a game in a much shorter amount of time than I would be able to if I was watching it live, for example.

So, because of that, I was able to consume and watch a lot of Vancouver Canucks hockey this year and it was incredible. So, after 82 games are played, the top 16 teams go to the Stanley Cup Playoffs. This is the name of the tournament which will crown the champion team, K?

So, 16 teams, the top 16 teams go to this tournament and so the tournament rules are that there are four rounds, four rounds of the tournament. So, there’s the first, I guess the top eight teams in the western part and the top eight teams in the eastern part, they play each other and it’s a best of seven.

So, in order to proceed to the next round in the tournament, you must win four games. You’ll play seven games, and you must win four out of those seven games. Well, you don’t necessarily play seven. If you win the first four, then you just go to the next round automatically.

You don’t have to complete all seven games. So, it’s the first team to win four games out of seven that proceeds to the next round. Well, the Vancouver Canucks made it to the playoffs, and this was really exciting because it’s been the first time in a long time that this has happened for this team.

And Vancouver fans are very, very passionate. It is one of the most passionate fan bases. I don’t want to say in sports. I’m sure there are some crazy, crazy fans for football in Europe. I’ve seen that like on the news and stuff, but I mean, Vancouver’s, their fans are pretty crazy too.

The two times that the Vancouver Canucks have made it to the Stanley Cup finals, now we’ve been a team since I believe the early 1970s before I was born. So, it’s been my whole life. We’ve only made it to the Stanley Cup finals, the final round of the tournament twice, once in 1994 and once in 2011.

Both times we almost won. We made it right to the very end of the final game, game seven of the Stanley Cup tournament. And we lost both times, unfortunately. So, we’ve never won the Stanley Cup. The Stanley Cup is the name of the trophy that is awarded to the championship team.

We’ve never won, but in both of those times in 94 and in 2011, after the Vancouver Canucks lost Vancouver Canucks fans, and maybe some people who are not quite fans, but we’re just opportunists or drunk or something. I don’t know. They rioted in the city. So especially I remember, you know, 1994, I was only 10 years old.

So, I do remember that time a little bit, but it’s not as clear as in 2011. In 2011, it was chaos in downtown Vancouver. The fans went into the streets, and they just started rioting. And rioting means like really just damaging lots of property senselessly, breaking store windows, damaging cars, flipping over cars, just this mob mentality.

Again, like a lot of people drinking too much alcohol and a lot of people who are just maybe looking for an excuse to cause problems, you know, there’s always those people, those troublemakers in society, unfortunately, and also just rage, right? Like it’s stupid. It’s just a game. It’s just ice hockey, but people do feel very passionate about it.

And when your team almost wins, but then doesn’t win at the very last moment, it can be very frustrating. And I guess people wanted to take that frustration out. So, these crazy mobs of people going through the streets of Vancouver, breaking windows, damaging property, fighting with the police, lighting police cars on fire.

Like it was wild. And they really destroyed the city, you know, not completely, but they did a lot of damage to the city. And it was very embarrassing for a lot of Vancouver residents and Canadians just in general. We felt like we’re better than this. Why are we destroying our own city after we lose a game? I mean, it would, we lost to Boston.

Boston was the team that beat us. I mean, it would make sense to go to Boston and kind of attack Boston, but Vancouver, I mean, very senseless, very stupid, but it just goes to show the passion, I think of Vancouver fans. So yeah, 1994 and 2011, those were the only two times that we’ve ever made it to the finals.

We’ve never won the cup, but this year after a break of many years, we finally made it into the Stanley Cup playoffs again. And many people were very optimistic this year. We thought our team looks good, maybe not quite a championship level team, but looks pretty good. And we thought maybe this year will be our year.

So, we got into the playoffs and the first round of the playoffs was against a team called the Nashville Predators. And that playoff series went the full seven games. So that means that Vancouver won three games, Nashville won three games, and then it had to go to that final seventh game to see who would proceed until the next round.

And Vancouver won. And watching that first round series was really, really exciting because although the Vancouver Canucks played well during the regular season, in the playoffs, they were really frustrating to watch. It didn’t seem like they were living up to their potential. That’s a great expression to know there, to live up to your potential.

If you live up to your potential, it means you do your best, right? You have a lot of talent, and you use all of that talent to help you play really well or to help you do something really well. This expression is not limited only to sports. It can be used in any regard, in professional situations, talking about musical talent, athletic talent, any kind of talent.

If you live up to your potential, you take advantage of your talent and of your skills and you use them to the best of your abilities. So, it felt like the Canucks weren’t really playing up to their potential, that they could do better. And it was really frustrating for me and a lot of my friends and fans.

I think there were so many armchair quarterbacks and backseat drivers during the playoff run here that we had in Vancouver. If you would go online, I like to unfortunately waste some time on the Vancouver Canucks Reddit forum where all of the fans post their comments and there’s something called a game thread.

So, while the game is happening live, all of the fans are commenting at the same time, reacting to it at the same time. And of course, I would be texting with some of my friends who are also fans at the same time. We were armchair quarterbacking a lot, which is actually an expression that we use to talk about football, but we can also use it in this kind of situation.

Can you guess the meaning of what it means, “an armchair quarterback”? A quarterback for people who don’t know is a position in American football and the quarterback is a very, very important player that controls the play and is really important for setting the plays in football.

What this expression means, “armchair quarterback”, is somebody who just sits in their armchair, sits in their chair, and watches the game on TV, yet tries to control the play, tries to act like the coach. And so of course when you’re watching the game on TV, you can’t kind of help but be like, “Ah, if I were the coach, I would do this or I would do that.”

And yeah, it’s really silly, right? Because there are professional coaches and you’re watching professional players and to think that I have more understanding of the game or more knowledge of the game than they do is very, very silly because of course they are experts and I’m just a fan just watching.

But you can’t help but feel this way sometimes when you see your team not play up to their potential. And yeah, a lot of, like an ice hockey game is 60 minutes. And for a lot of the game, I feel like the Vancouver Canucks looked like they were not playing up to their potential.

But then in the final moments, like sometimes in some games, even down to the final seconds, somehow, they put it together and they did play to their potential, and they were able to win the games in the very last dying seconds of the games. And so, this made for some extremely exciting hockey.

And it also made it so that you couldn’t give up on the game, even if the team fell behind at the start of the game. It meant that you had to watch to the end because like a few times, literally in the last minute or last two minutes of the game, they were able to win the game right at the end, despite the fact that they were losing for the first 56 minutes of the game or something like that.

So, it’s frustrating to watch for most of the time, but also super exciting to watch when they came back and won right at the very end. Nothing really like it. I think in my life, there’s nothing as thrilling as that feeling of Stanley Cup playoff ice hockey when your team is down and then they come back, and they win at the very end of the game.

So, thrilling. It’s so thrilling. I think there is, I haven’t felt a thrill like that in such a long time. So, it was super fun to watch, and my wife was laughing at me because some of the games that would happen like on Sunday morning is a popular time for an ice hockey game to happen here in Korea because in North America, Saturday night hockey is really popular.

So, I’d watch the games on Sunday morning. Sometimes they’d be quite early in the morning, like 7am or 8am. And when Vancouver would do one of these comeback wins, I’d be cheering and clapping and screaming like, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t contain my excitement.

And so, I think I was maybe the only person in my neighborhood or maybe the only person in Seoul who knows that was cheering like this. Sometimes if there’s a big soccer game happening in Korea or maybe an Olympic event, some kind of big international sporting event that’s really, really popular and all Korean people or most Korean people will be tuned in watching it, anybody who can.

Sometimes if this happens, when a goal is scored, it’s usually like soccer, but it could be baseball or some other sport, but we’ll take soccer for an example. If it’s like the World Cup or the Olympics or some big international tournament and Team Korea is playing an exciting game.

If a goal scores, you can hear many people cheer all at the same time because yeah, people live closer together here than they do in other countries. A lot of people living in apartments and the density of Seoul is so tightly packed that you can hear people cheer. I remember, I guess it was maybe the last Olympics or the last World Cup.

I can’t remember, but a recent international tournament, this happened and that was, I was watching, and it was like 0-0 or something like this. Maybe did I tell this story on Culips? I can’t remember, but at that time we had our dog Pinky, rest in peace Pinky, we miss you. I had Pinky and I had to take him out to go to the bathroom to go for a pee.

So, I took Pinky out and while I was out walking the dog, I heard the whole neighborhood come alive like, everybody’s screaming and cheering. And I knew at that moment that Korea had scored a goal and I went back and yes, indeed they had scored the goal. And you could just hear the roar of all of the fans watching the game at the same time.

So that’s really cool. But here in Korea, when I watched the Vancouver Canucks ice hockey team play, it’s not really the same. I think I’m the only one cheering and screaming. I’m sure there must be another few ice hockey fans here in Seoul, but I don’t know any. If you’re a big Canucks fan and you live in Seoul, send me a message.

Maybe we can hang out and watch a game in the future together, but it will have to be in the future because the Vancouver Canucks have been eliminated from the ice hockey tournament from the Stanley Cup playoffs, which is unfortunate.

We did make it to the second round. We did defeat Nashville. And then in the second round, we played one of our rivals, the Edmonton Oilers. The Edmonton Oilers are a really scary team because they have the, well, definitely the best ice hockey player in the world right now. His name is Connor McDavid. He’s amazing to watch.

Sometimes when I watch him, this is going to sound a little sappy, but there’s honestly been times where I’ve almost cried watching him play because he is such an amazing player. And it’s just beautiful to watch how he plays the game. It’s like, I love watching top talent, no matter what you do, if you can do it really well, better than anybody else in the world, it’s just amazing to see that kind of top talent.

So of course, he’s not the player that you want to play against, right? The best player in the world. And they have another guy on their team, a German guy named Leon Draisaitl, who’s also extremely good, one of the best players in the world. And so those two players in tandem are super frightening, super scary.

So, it’s not fun to have to play up against them. Vancouver Canucks, somehow, I think they were a little outmatched in this series, but somehow, they managed to take it to seven games, take it all the way to the very final moment. But they just seemed to run out of steam and run out of energy.

And Edmonton was able to defeat them in the seventh game to go to the Western finals, the Western Conference finals. So that was very sad for all Canucks fans. But, at the end of the day, I think this team overperformed what we were expecting them to. At the start of the season, we thought this team is not going to be very good.

But then they really surprised a lot of people. And we thought for a moment there in the middle of the season, we were like the number one team in the whole league. And at that point, some of us thought, well, maybe they will win. Maybe this year will be their year.

But in the end, the team maybe overperformed a little bit in the regular season and then ran out of steam, ran out of gas, ran out of energy. Those are all expressions that we use to talk about petering out of energy or petering out of steam. So, in the end, they just didn’t have what it takes. And they were eliminated in game seven in round two by the Edmonton Oilers.

So, everyone, that is what I’ve been up to over the last, well, May through May is watching hockey. And really, I’m really thankful to the Vancouver Canucks for giving me this awesome entertainment, the highs and lows of being a Vancouver Canucks fan. I tell you, there – there’s nothing like it.

And really, I’m thankful for the team because they gave me this entertainment all the way until May. Usually with Vancouver Canucks, when it’s April, it’s time to turn off the hockey because the season is over. But they gave me entertainment all the way until the end of May. So, I’m thankful to them for that.

But I’m also thankful that they are eliminated now because watching hockey took up a lot of my free time. And now that I have a little more free time, I can dedicate it to doing things like studying Korean, which I’m excited to jump into. For whatever reason, I seem to give up my Korean in favor of watching ice hockey. So that’ll change now.

Now ice hockey is done. I’ll keep my eye on who wins the Stanley Cup championship, but I’m not going to dedicate myself to watching every game. So Korean study coming on full ahead here for the summer and into the fall until the next season. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens next year. Anyways, everyone, I think we’ll wrap things up here.

Originally, I was going to tell you two stories, but I’ve rambled on and on and on, and we’re already over the 30-minute mark. So, I think that’s a good cue for me to wrap up and to take off. So, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Even if you’re not a hockey fan, I hope you found it entertaining and educational. Thank you as always for listening.

Don’t forget about the interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary. And if you’re a Culips member, you can also get the comprehension quiz, and that will be in the ad-free version of this episode on our website for members. And also, we’ll put it in the member only area of our Discord community as well.

Now I forgot, almost forgot again, I forgot last week, and I almost forgot right now, but I just remembered that I need to give you a completion code for this episode. So, for the completion code, let’s go with one of the idioms that we learned in this episode. And that is: “Armchair quarterback.”

Armchair quarterback, armchair quarterback. So, can you try and use this idiomatic expression, “armchair quarterback”, in an example sentence? Or if you can’t think of an example, you can just leave the completion code armchair quarterback. That’s fine too. Whatever you prefer.

But what you have to do is you have to leave a comment either on our Instagram page or our Discord community. Or if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can leave it in the YouTube comments, armchair quarterback.

And what that will do is it will signal to me and signal to our entire Culips community that you studied all the way to the end of this episode. You did it. You dedicated yourself to learning English today and you made it all the way to the end. So, you have some homework, OK? You know what you need to do.

You need to leave a comment with the completion code. So good luck. And I will be waiting to see what you guys come up with, with your completion code example sentences and comments.

Well, everyone, that brings us to the end. Great job as always. Thank you for completing an English study session with me today. Pat yourself on the back. Nice work. Take care and have a great week ahead. I’ll be back with another brand new Culips episode a little later in the week. Until then, bye bye.