Hilary Meets the Land of the Morning Calm

Last week Sasha proposed that we check out a pro-baseball game this weekend. Having never been to a pro-anything game and never personally been a lover of baseball, I didn't really understand why she was so keen on doing this, but I went along with it.



 A helpful co-worker of mine showed me how to check the times of games, and we discovered there was a game against the Busan Giants and Seoul's Doosan Bears this Saturday at 5PM. The stadium is on Sasha's side of town, only a two stops down from Jamsil. My co-worker explained to me that it is approaching play-off season here, so it should be a popular game...boy was she right!


After having lunch with one of Sasha's co-workers at a popular noodle restaurant where the noodles are made right there for everyone to see, we headed to the stadium. My co-worker told me to follow the baseball hats to know which exit to take out of the subway station. Tickets were 8,000 won each (about $8) and we got there an hour early to get seats. Unfortunately though, the place was already packed! The stadium of 34,000 was crawling with people, and there weren't two empty chairs to be found in our section. Finally, we ventured down to a section of better (and more expensive) empty seats and figured we'd keep them warm until their owners arrived. This worked for the first 40min of the game. You can see from the picture above how great they were...

We quickly discovered the Busan Giants fans are the best crowd to hang with: they are the most passionate and creative about cheering for their team.





The Busan Giants have a super-energetic cheer-orchestrator-guy. His stage was very close to our initial seats, and you can see by the video below he kept things very interesting:



The Busan Giants fans start young:






...And the Busan Giants fans grow up to be resourceful people who make pom-poms out of newspaper and hats out of funny orange bags:











We did eventually have to move and the rest of the game we kept hopping around the stadium in between beverage/bathroom runs finding new places to sit. You can see this photo we are now directly opposite where we were before:











We discovered the stairs were just as good and nobody bothered us there. These turned out to be the best seats: just look at our view! Fly balls were hitting near us all the time!



After, we found ourselves a restaurant and Sasha did some darn fine good ordering (see picture of intense ordering concentration below).

In the end we got a lot of soju, some meat and more soju. We took multiple pictures of the soju and forgot to take any of the yummy grilled meat...Did I mention we ordered soju?