Finally, our long awaited chance to improve our beating skills and make ethnic and racial slurs, all in the name of good fun.
It came this past Sunday as part of the East Asian Football Championships, or some other equally glamorously named event. We headed up to the World Cup Stadium for the clash of the Communist titans, as China beat the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in a pretty good game, that North Korea really should have crushed the Chinese, but somehow just couldn't connect. I guess that's the trend these days, the Chinese are on the up and up, today's Zeitgeist, and nobody's quite got them figured out... there's no stopping them. Oh the horror.
After that the local interest really kicked in as our own ROK heroes were matched up against the horrific Japanese. The fans were impressively decked out uniformly in red and making solemn declarations about the sanctity of East Sea rocks. Not that great a game, and Japan managed to score in the 84th minute.
In the end China seems to have "won" the tournament, and received copious medals and fireworks. Interestingly, the South Korean audience still has strong affinity for the North Korean team, and cheers them on vigorously. Other than that, this is a long weekend, and we may head down to Busan for the occasion to sample their excellent Indian cuisine, and marvel at the Sea of People that is Haeundae Beach in August. Apparently they jack up the prices around the board, and lines everywhere are even longer than usual, so it should make for a rollicking good time. We can marvel at the phenomenon of Koreans bathing fully attired. (Though in a quirk of fate, yet to be worked out, even polite Koreans have deemed it acceptable to swim in bathing suits at indoor pools and amusement parks, and completely naked in jinja-bongs (although I do realise that jinja-bongs are segregated).)
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