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.