Korean Baseball

How to even begin to describe Korean baseball- it's more about entertainment than the sport itself!

Here's their stadium before the game, South Korea has 8 professional baseball teams so they just rotate playing each other. Incheon's team is called the Wyverns, some type of sea-dragon. And there's actually a girl and boy version of the mascot, so the whole yin/yang thing going on even in baseball:

That's the boy, and the girl is hot pink. Each team has two foreigners on it, one of ours was Brian Gordon, who has played for the Yankees and also the Texas Rangers at one point. The South Koreans LOVE him, they nicknamed him the Golden Pitcher! 

So funny. Anyways, while your home team is batting there are CONSTANT coordinated cheers and songs going on the entire time, one after another. It is so weird! You can't even watch your own team bat because of the craziness that is going on! There are cheerleaders and then a main yell leader organizing it all! Here's a few pics, yell leader up in the boat:

Cheerleaders:

Oh and you stand the entire time your team bats also. Those red bats people are holding and banging together aren't given away for free like back in the US, they buy them here and then actually deflate them, fold them up, and bring them to each game. Here are a few short videos of some of the chants/songs:

And of course for snacks baseball wouldn't be the same without some dried squid right?!! But don't worry, they have Burger King there also and your traditional ballpark hotdog:

And don't forget about the random large cutouts of the team:

The score for the game was 12-0 (our team won) so even though it was a complete shut out, the game was tons of fun and very entertaining. It was perfect weather, it had rained all morning but by the time 5 pm rolled around it had lost all the humidity and had that crisp and a bit cool feeling that makes you think fall is just around the corner.  Their baseball season is actually supposed to be over by now, but since they've gotten an unusually large amount of rain this summer their season is going through November 5th right now! So I'll probably be going to another game, especially once fall really gets here.

After the game we were going to get lamb kebobs, but the restaurant apparently closed overnight (something that happens a lot here) so we went and had Korean BBQ instead. Here's a pic of our group, most of them are teachers I work with:

Another picture of the Korean BBQ setup:

Not all of the side dishes were on the table yet, but you can se some of them, and your scissors to cut the meat. Close up of the grill:

You cook your meat, mushrooms, garlic, kimchi on there and pull it off when it's ready!

EXTREMELY hot peppers. I mean, I accidentally dropped one of my pieces of meat in them and just got a little bit of pepper juice on it, thought it would be fine, but literally my eyes were watering up involuntarily. The Korean teachers I work with were playing a game to see who would have to eat a pepper, and if Koreans think something is unbelievably spicy, than that's a good heads up to steer clear of it! 

After dinner we all went and had a drink at WaBar, and then we went out to a Norebang, which is Korean style karaoke! You rent a room for an hour and they have hundreds of songs to choose from, pretty much every song you can think of and a bunch of random ones that you have no idea how they found the record to. Here's Emma, Jemma, and Cassy singing away:

Oh yes, they also give you about 5 tambourines and there are disco and strobe lights going if you want, so random but so much fun! This is them telling me I have to pick a song to sing next:

So it was a really great weekend, and I realize it's already thursday and I'm still writing about last weekend, but so much has been happening I want to document as much as I can! I'm in the midst of planning a trip to Busan/Pusan (same city, goes by 2 names because of Korean pronunciation) for Chuseok next month, which is their version of Thanksgiving. EVERYONE travels during this time though, so most of the train, bus, and plane tickets are sold out! So hopefully that works out, it's a four day weekend so it's a really great opportunity to see other parts of Korea as long as I can get there!

Ok that's all for now, I'll leave you with a Korean word of the day:

Gunbae (pronounced gun-bay) = cheers!