Korean Baseball

Everyone kept saying that I was bound to get sick within a month of being in Korea. Once I hit the one month mark I thought maybe I was lucky and missed it. But no, the last few days I have come down with some sort of cold/flu. It's mostly respiratory, but some stomach issues as well. Right now we are nearing the end of what they call yellow dust. It comes from the deserts of Mongolia and China and covers everything, including our lungs with it. That could be one reason. Another is that the air here is very polluted anyway and I've been running around like crazy. Monsoon season is approaching though and will wash it away. But then I will have to get used to it being very hot and humid. Anyway, since I've been sick I haven't don't have much exciting news to share. The only thing I've done in the last week is tried to make it through work and I went to a Korean baseball game.

Sure you may think baseball, how can it be different in Korea? Well, it doesn't matter what the subject most likely they do it different in some way here. The game itself is played the same. But it's the crowd of crazy fans that behave so differently. The game is cheap, everybody pays $8, but there is no assigned seating. So if you don't get there early it's more difficult to find a seat. First they start the game with some people on the field doing really cool martial arts. Almost all of the fans buy those long blow-up sticks that you hit together. This was insane to watch because you have two sides battling in the same stadium. There is a guy on a platform that leads the chants and it was so trippy to see one side in yellow moving all the same and the other side in white. This definetely beats the wave. I payed more attention to the crowd then the game itself. I bought some for the team that we were cheering for, but it was hard to keep up as they kept changing. I took some videos because it's hard to describe, but with the sounds of stomping and some of the cheering I felt like we were in Nazi Germany at times. They even had cheerleaders get up on the platform at certain points of the game. The food available was KFC or Burger King. I can't believe they had no hot dogs at a baseball game, but whatever. They even had convenience stores inside the game, so at least the beer price wasn't jacked up. It was $3 for a beer, rather than the usual $8-10 back home. Oh and the scenery around the game was nice too. The Olympic Stadium was there, some city shots, and always mountains in the background.