Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Bars and baseball

Weekends, live music, mostly foreigners, still very fun times.


Cute Korean Keyboardist.


Ahh, baseball, the national past time, right up there with soccer and badminton. Here in Korea there 8 teams, they are all sponsored by Korean companies like LG, Kia, or for the Busan team, they are sponsored by Lotte, which owns shopping malls, apartments, movie theatres and just about everything. The great thing about having sports teams supported by massive corporations is that they use sports as another form of advertising and to boost the moral of fans and city. They are more concerned with everyone having fun than fleecing the fan for every cent they can. Here a few examples:

You can bring in your own booze! That's right, BYOB pro sports. technically your not supposed to bring hard alcohol, just beer, but they don't check. Walking up to the stadium, you see groups of people with shopping bags full of 2 litre bottles of beer. And if you run out while at the game, you can walk down to the 7-11 that is in the stadium and pick-up a beer for the same price you'd pay anywhere. This leads to a joyous and happy stadium, full of singing and cheering. and by the 6th or 7th inning, very full bathrooms, and people who can barely walk down the stairs. But atleast you're in a city where it's easy to take public transport and you don't have to worry about a bunch of drunks on the road.

The tickets are super cheap. At the most 20 dollars, that will get you right in the actions. 8 dollars will get you "excitement zone" and 6 bucks will get you in the outfield, where you have a good chance of catching a homerun hit by the opposing team. (Busan's not very good.)

Dancers. every couple inning's on the first base side there are dances performed by scantily clad ladies. It's the standard K-pop group dance, but for their last dance, when the crowd is good and sauced up, they wear a little less clothes and dance around. It's enough for all foreigners to look at each other and say. "wow, I can't believe they just did that at a baseball game."

Orange rally bags. As you can see in my picture. When the Giants are losing, which is every game. They handout plastic bags which are to be tied on your head, as a sign of suport for the team, and to make you generally look like a fool. And for the Koreans, to make them feel silly and forget about how they work 70 hours a week. * This is not a very environmentally friendly practice, that's about 30,000 plastic bags people tie on their heads for about 45 minutes, then throw on the ground. That would never work in the states. But they do it every game here.


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1 comment:

  1. Dude reminds me of the time in Jinju when I watched a bunch of motionless Korean uni students playing classic rock in the street. This tiny girl reached out her hand, almost timidly, and laid down a blistering keyboard solo on Deep Purple's Highway Star.

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