Baseball in Korea

Anybody remember the Tom Selleck (sp?) movie "Mr. Baseball"? And do you remember watching it and thinking, "Surely Asians aren't that fanatic about their baseball teams?" You would be mistaken - unfortunately, I really think that Asians (in this case Koreans and Japanese) love baseball even more than your average American might. What a bummer, considering it's OUR national past time.

But I digress. We've been wandering our way up to Seoul in the last few months, and discovered the quickest way to get to see some "professional" baseball teams in Korea. The Doosan Bears and the LG Twins share a stadium in Jamsil, just on the east side of Seoul, so you're guaranteed to have a home game every weekend. Tall boys of Korean beer are $2 each, the fans have no idea what you're screaming in English (ops tested, to the dismay of any English-speaking Koreans in the stands), and the games are actually pretty exciting. What more can you ask for from a Saturday afternoon then to sit in an open-air stadium with 15,000 of your closest friends, get hammered, and watch baseball.

That's the other funny thing about Korean baseball - the teams are all named after their sponsors. The LG Twins for instance, are sponsored by the LG electronics company, and Twins fans chant "LG! LG! LG!" when stuff goes right. Imagine Derek Jeter hitting a home run and having the fans chant "Chrysler! Chrysler! Chrysler!" as their cheer. Weird.

Anyway, the pictures below are from the first game we went to go see, the Doosan Bears vs. the Hanwha Eagles.

This is just a picture of the field, but the video below shows how the stands divided out between the Eagles fans (orange) and the Bears fans (white). You can also hear the organized cheering that the Bears fans have started, with a little help from the Bears' cheerleaders. Yes, I said it. Korean baseball has CHEERLEADERS. MLB, stand up and take note.

Finally, we discovered that in Korea, they've never heard of the seventh-inning stretch, so we loudly led the charge on that one (the Koreans loved it - we got a standing ovation). They also apparently had never seen the "wave". How America has failed to export that sports fan maneuver, I'll never know, but we decided to try and teach them how it worked. Fortunately, Bodhi had had enough Korean beer to lead the charge, and after twelve tries, we finally got a wave that carried all the way around the stadium - in fact, it even reversed course and came back! I would be lying if I didn't feel like at least now I had made a contribution to the Korean culture (significance is still up for debate). The Korean kids liked it so much, they adopted Bodhi as their unofficial mascot and kept asking him to lead the wave again for the rest of the game.

Korean Adventures

Well, since Jenny hadn't updated this in a while, I decided I would start blogging here as well (shout out to Hook for blogging on his and Laura's site) and share some of the wonderful sights that I've been seeing here in Korea. As most of you probably already know, the 13 FS is halfway through a six-month AEF deployment to Suwon AB, Korea. Not exactly what we had in mind when we were practicing our CAS procedures in the desert over Nellis, but things could be a LOT worse.

I thought to start I would post some of the pictures and video of some of the sights the bros have been checking out while here in Korea. The first set of pictures is from our trip up to the DMZ, or Demilitarized Zone, the 4 KM buffer zone between north Korea and the ROK. Seeing as how these two countries are still "technically" at war (which I'm sure if you've been reading the news, isn't that hard to believe), the place is pretty heavily guarded.




This first picture is of me looking across the Han River into North Korea. What can I say? Koreans are short ...






These second two pictures are from the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom. Over my left shoulder you can probably make out a NoDAK soldier giving us the squirrely eye. What you DON'T see is the other four or five guys hidden in the windows taking pictures of all of us. Creepy. The blue building over my right shoulder is where the North Koreans and the South Koreans/US have their meetings/conferences. No kidding, if you look, you can see the concrete slabs that run through the courtyard behind me that denote the border between the two countries. Inside the conference room, the conference table is also arranged so that the table is perfectly on the border between the two countries.


Here is the table I was talking about ... this big guys is one of two South Korean guards posted in the room. In order to qualify in the South Korean Army to be a guard in the JSA, you have to be at least 6'1". In a country full of midgets, these are the biggest Koreans I've seen.

Finally, this is the North Korean village across the border. The flag pole you can see, and the NK flag on it, are both in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the largest pole (gross) and flag, respectively. They blare propaganda music from loudspeakers trying to lure South Koreans to come over to the North. Funny thing is, most of the buildings are only building faces - no backs, just the facade. Anybody defecting is going to find himself mighty lonely, but then again, it's all a big show here on the ROK.

That's all for today, but tomorrow I will try to post some less weird, and significantly more "normal" activities to do in Korea. CP!

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