Know what? We don’t like soccer. It’s boring, it has two names, it’s on all the time on every screen in every bar in the world (that or, inexplicably, motorcycle racing). Rugby and cricket? Just plain wrong. So what, we’re provincial. Luckily with satellite TV strapped to the new Slingbox booster rocket, we can be happily provincial with our coalition of the provincially-willing talking trifectas and two point conversions while broadband connections pump red-blooded American sports directly into our Qingdao drip at 8 a.m. in the morning. Go Hoosiers!

"If only I could find Serbian food like kajmak, gibanica, and cevapcici in Shanghai, my family wouldn’t see me, even for Christmas,” says Hana Ilic, City Weekend Shanghai’s newest intern. This Serb knows her way around town, from the latest hot spots to hole-in-the-wall local grubberies, and it's made her into a listings bible for her fellow students. “Someone once called me from a cab to ask for an address of a club," she recalls. "It was 1 a.m. on a Wednesday night and I barely knew the person who woke me up from my ever-so-blissful sleep, but somehow I managed to blurt out the address without as much as a stutter. That’s what interning for City Weekend will do to you.”

An avid swimmer and aquarium-lover, new City Weekend intern Sienna Parulis-Cook jumped (dove? dived?) at the chance to write up the best diving and snorkeling sites in Asia. More importantly, it gave her pause to recall family snorkeling vacations to the Caribbean she took during her childhood. “Reading about all the colorful fish and beautiful coral made me long to go somewhere tropical again,” she says, “and I’d especially like to see a blue spotted sting ray or a hammerhead shark one day!” Perhaps even more appealing, though, were the gorgeous resorts Sienna virtually visited as November and its cold, gray days arrived in Beijing. “I’m already trying to figure out when I can get to Borneo and spend a week sitting in a hammock in my private sea bungalow,” she sighs.

"I didn't even know rugby had a world cup," says Jonny Haagen who spent this month discovering what sports China's expats are willing to wake up for at 5 a.m. Haagen spoke with sports fans and bar owners in Beijing and Shanghai to learn what games and competitions draw people in, what gets them riled up, and what has them boozing over their breakfast special. "It's no surprise that the World Cup is the biggest event for these bars," Haagen says, "but it turns out cricket and rugby are bigger draws than the NBA and March Madness. If American sports fans can't do better than that, we don't deserve freedom. We don't even deserve freedom fries."