Last week I taught a lesson on American high schools, which is good for a couple easy oohs and ahhs. (The sentence “My school day ended at 3:25,” for instance, when spoken to a room full of boys who regularly stay at school until 10 o’clock basically guarantees pandemonium, equal parts delight and jealous rage.) One of the things they learned is that at most U.S. high schools both boys and girls play sports, so many girls are very athletic. (When asked, “What does athletic mean?” students’ answers ranged from the phonetically similar “excellent” to the chaos-inducing “sexy.” Yes, many American girls are very sexy. Ha ha.) I was forced to admit that throughout high school I, personally, played exactly zero sports (omitting my brief stint on the junior varsity tennis team, when my doubles partner and I were ranked 15th out of 15 teams and our best shots were the ones where we lobbed the ball directly into the net, preventing our opponents from actually returning the ball and forcing us to lunge pathetically and ineffectively around the court). Anyway, this complete athletic inability translated into a total lack of interest in sports throughout high school and college (my apologies to Rosie, who attempted to explain to me the fundamentals of football at least ten times over the course of our four years in college, as well as to anyone I ever played soccer with, ’cause I probably only succeeded in standing right in your way as you attempted to make a brilliant shot). All of this may change, though, as I have now attended not one but two Korean sporting events and my overall evaluation is: they are awesome. Sporting event number one was a soccer game, Daejon vs. Busan, held in Daejon in the World Cup Stadium. A few things set the Daejon game apart from your typical American soccer game (I imagine, having never ACTUALLY attended an American soccer game). First of all, Daejon’s team mascot appeared to be…Che Guevara. I’m not kidding. Che is actually a very popular figure over here; I’ve seen a lot of people around in his t-shirts. In this case, though, he was displayed on a giant, waving banner and framed by a somewhat ornate crest in Daejon’s maroon and gold, his dark eyes glaring down on the cheering fans. I’m also guessing that the ramen vendors might be an element unique to Korea. These are the women who patrol the stands toting not boxes full of hotdogs slung round their necks, but a bagful of packaged ramen in one hand and a giant brass kettle in the other. No one ordered any, despite their loud, frequent shouts, but I was having trouble picturing the scenario if someone had. I mean, are you supposed to bring your own bowl? Perhaps the most surreal moment of the afternoon, though, came during halftime. The ball boys (is that what they’re called? Those guys that run around catching stray balls?) set up cones in the middle of the field delineating a miniature soccer field, and fairly soon after that twenty six-year olds ran onto the field to the strains of…German death metal? According to Courtney, an expert on Korean pop music, it was actually some Korean band, but the music had all the venom and anger of Rammstein. Go, little tykes, go!

Alright, quick note here. I have some more stuff to write about, but if the rest of this entry is a little incoherent it is because I have just been forced to drink four huge cups of makoli by the clutch of ajumah’s sitting here with me. That is to say: Today is Gumi High School’s birthday—of course schools have birthdays!—so I have the day off. I decided to spend the day productively sitting in the park doing nothing. Actually, though, this has turned out to be one of my most social days on record. This morning I planted myself in the little pagoda next to the basketball courts, not realizing that the Gumi High School basketball club was meeting here today--definitely strange given that this park is on the opposite side of Gumi from school. For the next hour or so there was a steady stream of students passing by to say hi, until they all left for lunch, taking me with them. We wandered around Hyeongkokdong for a while, finally settling on an all-you-can eat meat place, and I spent all of lunch watching my students eat the most ridiculous amount of meat I have ever seen. Piles. This was meat not even tempered by rice, though some did go so far as to wrap their bacon or beef or shrimp or ham or what have you in little pieces of lettuce. My God. Anyway, after lunch I settled in a different, larger pagoda. Here, a group of women sat in a circle, singing traditional Korean songs. I felt pretty inconspicuous until one of them came and sat next to me, demanded to know how much my computer cost and then my name, which she interpreted as “Kee.” “Kee! Kee!” she kept shouting, and then dragged me over their mat to drink makoli. Ah, and just about twelve seconds ago one of them came over, stroked my face and started singing a song involving the word “beautiful.” I’ve just spotted two empty bottles of wine. That explains some things.

OK, what was I talking about? Right, Korean sports. Last weekend Jenn M., Sarah P. and I met up in Busan, and on Friday decided to take in a baseball game. Unlike American baseball teams, which represent particular cities, Korean teams represent particular corporations. Ha. The game we saw pitted the Kia Tigers against the Lotte Giants; I only missed seeing the Samsung Lions by a day, which it too bad because living in Gumi basically requires you to worship all things Samsung. It was a pretty standard baseball game, though instead of waving big number one fingers or hitting plastic rods together, everyone made pom-poms out of newspaper. I mean, the entire stadium. It was impossible to tell the Lotte fans from the Kia fans cause everyone was waving these identical pompoms in the air. At some point the guys behind us, who were very excited that we had bought beer from a vendor (this is my most alcohol-laden post yet), made us our own pompoms and proceeded to laugh uproariously every time one of us waved ours in the air. Koreans are also big fans of the wave, but they seem to have trouble putting the brakes on. I counted one wave that circled the stadium eight times. Is that normal? I was worried that it was never going to stop, and that I would spend the entire game watching not the game but the people next to me, nervously waiting for my turn to stand.