Yes. That's the answer to that particular question, you have all been waiting to have answered......'can you get American football (the National Football League) games in Ecuador?'
NFL games are quite a big deal amongst the majority of ex pats that I have met thus far. The primary vehicle for transmission of the games is 'The Sunday NFL Ticket.' I have Direct TV and this feature came with the plan that I have ($70.99 per month). The NFL ticket can also be purchased online and delivered over the internet. There are also no doubt, ways to acquire the games that have a much smaller pricetag and larger consequence if discovered. I am not privy to any of these devices.
What NFL Ticket boils down to is broadcasts of the NFL Network. No commercials, just some unbelievably boring music that loops through each commercial break. Tedious, but better than ads for Pizza Hut, The Finger Hut, Nut Hut, and Hut-two-three. Some folks are paying $200.00 for the full season of NFL ticket.
Now all of this is simply a preamble to the real story.
Last night my beloved, and sometimes disappointing, Seattle Seahawks were in Green Bay to tangle on the unfrozen tundra with the Packers. This was a Sunday night prime-time game. And of course it was not covered by the NFL network and thus not available on NFL Sunday Ticket. Woe is me. I finally found the game being broadcast in Spanish..
Now this is an experience for a clown like myself whose Spanish vocabulary includes; 'buenos dias', 'por favor', 'taco', and now 'lunes'. The announcers rattled on, just like a US broadcast and they probably spouted the same cliche , space-filling, silence-killing crap that accompanies all sports broadcasts. 'Oh gee Tank, did you know his mailman's cat was killed in a tragic and unexpected accident last week?' 'It just shows the level of his professional commitment that he is out giving his all to the game he loves, earning seven hundred fifty five thousand dollars, after such a tragedy.' I can't say.They may have been rattling off very relevant and insightful data. My Spanish sucks so I remain in the dark where I have spent a good portion of my life to date..
One thing that I can tell you definitively though, is this (es esta). Spanish television commercials for goods, services and upcoming productions are just as boring when repeated ad nausea, as their US counterparts. Even though I rarely had much of a clue as to what was being hocked.
Oh well.