Fighting Korea!

By now you've probably seen the pictures Beth posted from our rain-soaked trip to Seoul City Hall to watch Korea's opening World Cup match against Greece.

Beth and I got to Seoul earlier that afternoon to meet some friends and sightsee, but it was raining a lot so we just went to a Western bar near City Hall and ate nachos and drank Filipino beer and waited for the rain to slack up.

It did after a while and we realized we were near Myeongdong, so Beth decided she wanted to check out Myeongdong Cathedral, something she's been dying to see since we got here. It's a beautiful church, but it was starting to rain again, so Beth went into the cathedral to take pictures, but when she did, she realized there was a wedding going on. She snapped some anyways and we left, agreeing that we'd like to come back on a nicer day, when we could look around a lot more.

We got a call from some friends saying they were in Itaewon eating Mexican food, so we met them and had more nachos and drank margaritas before heading to a Canadian tavern.

We made our way back to City Hall after a while and when we got there it was still raining and very crowded. A lot of people had umbrellas but common courtesy says you don't hold them up when a crowd is trying to watch a game on a giant TV. So people traded their umbrellas for red ponchos. There were guys coming through the crowd selling beer and people were already chanting and singing.

Throughout the game, we learned all kinds of new chants. "Dae Hamingook!" was the most-used one, which just means "Republic of Korea." There was also another chant that sounded like, "This is Korea!" When Korea scored a goal, fireworks went off and the crowd erupted with them.

It rained most of the game and we were soaked even with our ponchos. But we had a lot of fun and we made lots of new friends. When their team wins a big game (Korea beat Greece 2-0), Koreans don't riot and beat people up and break things like animals, they just want to hug everyone and share drinks with you and talk to you. People kept coming up to us and happily shaking our hands and hugging us and telling us we looked like various celebrities. The rest of the night we heard groups of people cheering and singing, all through the streets and in the subways and on the buses. No one got in a fight, no cars got turned over or lit on fire. It was just a merry celebration, and I'm glad we were a part of it.

Korea lost to Argentina 0 - 4, but they beat Nigeria so they advance to the next round. I hope we get to see a lot more games and celebrate at least a few more wins.

Pics coming soon, if you haven't already seen them on Facebook.

The Delivery Man

I've pretty much mastered the fine art of ordering food for delivery here. Beth's co-teacher a while back gave us a booklet filled with menus of delivery and takeout food, from pizza to fried chicken to Chinese to bibimbap. At first, I was kind of apprehensive about using it, but my laziness and unwillingness to actually leave the apartment to get food outweighed my hesitancy to learn how to grunt out over the phone what I want and where to bring it.

It's probably not the best for our health, the fact that I now know how to have a guy come on a scooter with a bucket of fried chicken and literally place said bucket at my feet in our apartment. (Delivery men won't ever cross the shoe/no-shoe threshold, so they just put the food on the floor to handle the money transaction.)

In Flight

Flights for summer vacation are booked. Incheon --> Manila --> Puerto Princesa --> Manila --> Hong Kong --> Incheon.

We'll be gone July 27 - August 8, eight days in the Philippines and five in Hong Kong.

That's about the only interesting news right now. We heard some explosions the other night, but we read that the US and South Korean navies were doing a military exercise in the Yellow Sea near here, so we assumed that's what it was.

The World Cup starts this weekend, and Korea plays Greece Saturday night, so we're going to spend Saturday night watching the match at Seoul City Hall with a million or so screaming Koreans.