Korean Baseball

Wow! Koreans sure love baseball. Recently, Joe invited some of the senior members of his Troop to a Doosan Bears vs Giants baseball game. Many of the people who went, myself included, had never been to a Korean baseball game and we were definitively in for a good time.

There were 14 of us in the group and the only place we could get 14 seats together was on the Giants side of the stadium. The Giants side also happened to be the side in the sun. It was overcast when we left Camp Casey in the morning, but by the time we arrived at the stadium in Seoul the sun was out in full force. Our friends Joe and Vallisa were smart and brought an umbrella, but I didn't even bring a hat. Joe was awesome and bought a Doosan Bears baseball hat for me to help shield the sun from my face and ears (the ears being key in Joe's mind). I'll come better prepared next time.

Enjoying the Sun

What really suprised me was how excited the Koreans got during the game and how vigorously they cheered. A couple times I went out to get another cold drink or ice cream and I would hear incredibly loud cheering start, the kind of cheering that at a MLB baseball game would indicate that someone just hit a home run. I'd rush back to my seat only to find that the cheering was because the batter had hit a single and was now on first base. There was one home-run scored during the game, and from the noise I almost expected fireworks to start shooting up in celebration. Though it was very noisy, the excitement in the crowd made the game a lot more fun than a game of MLB in the US. 

Around the 6th inning piles of orange plastic bags, think of plastic grocery bags, started to make their way around to everybody in the stands. Joe Squared (that being Joe and his friend Joe) and I assumed that they must be for all the garbage we were accumulating and so we started to put our trash in them. We were wrong. Very wrong. I don't know how we would've thought they were for trash when of course they were for Giants fans to wear on their heads. There were two main styles of wear, the Bow and the Balloon. Being Bears fans, most of the group opted out of wearing the bag (and because ours were already stuffed with trash), however, I did catch Joe's XO modeling the balloon style bag hat. 

Giants Fans with the Bow Style Bag

 When in Rome...

I'm not sure who won for sure because we left before the end of the game in order to beat the mad rush of 90,000 fans leaving the stadium, but when we left the Bears were leading 2-0. Though it was incredibly hot, the game was overall a lot more enjoyable than a MLB game because of all the excitement in the stands. Hopefully we will make it to more games while we are in Korea.