MaGu MaGu

I attended my first Korean baseball game today. It was intense. Koreans care about baseball a great deal, and choose to cheer for one or more of the 8 professional baseball teams with home fields around the country. There were several highlights from the afternoon. I think you are essentially expected to buy those inflatable plastic sticks that you hit together to make noise. I’m sure everyone in the stadium had them. The cheering was phenomenal. During every pitch of the game, supporters of each team would chant the name of the batter. Korean 3 syllable names lend themselves nicely to clever and sometimes silly chants. For instance, for Na Ji Wan, tens of thousands of people were singing “Na na na na na Na Ji Wan…” taken from La Bamba. Also the YMCA song was sung with any given player’s first and second name during the “Hey man” part. In keeping with names, it is interesting to note that 9 of the 18 players fielding tonight either had the last name Lee or Park. Korea is great because there are few places where you can get ripped off. Any sporting event back home would serve a product with ridiculous inflated prices, but in Korea they don’t do that. 10 dollars got a two-person meal of hamburgers, chicken fingers and coke. That type of food sounds normal for a baseball game, but most people were eating/serving ramen, udon, and dried cuttlefish, along with beers and personal bottles of soju for cheap. The home team’s cheerleaders came out to do a nice dance in full baseball uniforms, but soon stripped down to more appropriate attire, next to nothing, which consequently raised more than just eyebrows.

Everland

Several months back, just before Halloween, I visited Korea’s version of Disneyworld: Everland. Everland is a huge amusement park located in the same city in which I live, and welcomes visitors 365 days a year. In the summer they have a separate park exclusively for water slides and rides. I went to the theme park with impressive rides, including a giant wooden rollercoaster, the fastest in Asia, with a 77-degree drop, and a safari tour with all sorts of animals, with the highlight being a real liger. Everything was a Halloween theme when I visited the park, so they hosted many spooky rides, one being a cross between laser tag and a haunted house where ghosts and skeletons pop out, and you proceed to own them. They had an area that sold a collection of international foods from all over the world. There was a diner with the slogan “Tastes better burger. Have a fun in Burgercafe.” I always love the top shelf translation. They also had a spectacular fireworks show that puts any other I have seen to shame. Probably the most interesting thing that I got to see was a “cat show” in which well-trained cats performed pretty peculiar acts like walking on tight ropes and pull ups. Top off the night with a merry-go-round and you’ve got a repeat visitor.

A Korean Winter Wonderland

This past winter in Korean hosted an unusual amount of snow, including one record-breaking trial of 26 centimetres over the course of a single day.   While this type of storm is quite commonplace in my hometown of Ottawa, it is not usually met with such trepidation and hysteria, as it was in the gu of Korea.  As a result of this inclement weather, my school was closed for two days, while the uniform-clad army worked hard to manually shovel the streets around the districts.  As I perused the streets, I noticed managers in suits and ties throwing salt on the street and parking lots with their bare hands, as teams of employees swept the snow away from the entrances to the shops and department stores with brooms.  Several weeks later, a light snowstorm postponed my school’s field trip to see the Wizard of Oz.  I’ve also noticed that Koreans use umbrellas during all four seasons.  Not simply for rain, but also for sun, snow, and I think falling leaves in autumn too.