Basketball

At the end of January I attended my first Korean basketball game. I remember thinking during the experience that it was totally surreal. I think because it was so colorful and everyone was so excited and loud and because it was like watching a video game. I was also confused about which team I was supposed to be rooting for, since everyone around me was cheering for the away team, and neither the fans nor the screens all over the walls were calling the teams by their team names, only by the sponsor name. That seems kind of screwy to me.


Here's the stadium in Ulsan:



The court seemed smaller than an American court, in keeping with my experience at the baseball game.


Cheerleaders:



Time out?


Resume game:


The house was seriously packed. I was quite disappointed to find that unlike at the baseball game, there were no traveling vendors, and no cheap beer. I hate beer, anyway. But I did get hungry and all they had for concessions were soft drinks and water, ramen bowls, and skewered hot dogs. Actually, I saw people with pizza, but I'd happened to have pizza for lunch, so I thought it would be a bad idea to repeat the meal.


Part of the surreality of this whole thing, yet which was so Korean, was the hype man who was out there riling up the audience practically the whole game:



I'm getting kind of lazy here, so I'm just going to give you all the videos at the end, instead of trying to fit them into appropriate places in the pseudo-narrative.

Here are some precious midget cheerleaders who performed after the first quarter or something:



There were a lot of events going between quarters, and even during time-outs and other game pauses that they stuck in there for fun. This was some sort of contest for audience members:



The cheerleaders for Ulsan's Mobus Phoebus team performed several times, often leading the audience in dances that they all know and love, which are of course totally foreign to me:


Stop. Bannertime:


These are the last few moments of the game. Ulsan won by some ridiculous amount, like 20-30 points. My friends, who actually follow the local sports, told me the opposing team was second in placings right now, and Ulsan was first. If the second place team gets their asses kicked this hard, I'd hate to see how the others play.

Second Korean Wedding

In January I went to the wedding of another of my coworkers. Korean weddings kill me. The first one wasn't too bad, just a little different in terms of having an emcee commentate the whole ceremony and people not sitting down and shutting up for the whole thing and a couple other minor aspects. But it seems to me that a wedding should be special. This second wedding was about the least special event I could imagine.

The wedding was in the Munsu Wedding Hall, by the soccer stadium. I went into the place and found that there were dozens of weddings going on at the same time, with new ones starting every ten or twenty minutes. I had to visit an info desk (well, two actually) to find out which room to go to, and when I got there I still wasn't sure I was in the right place. I was a few minutes late because it took so long to get a taxi, and people were all crowded around in the area outside the wedding room. I couldn't see the face of the bride, and the professional photos outside the hall of the bride and groom looked totally unfamiliar. Also, I didn't see anyone I knew from work.

This is what that area looked like, except most of the crowd was behind me:





Here's what the wedding looked like from outside, which is where I had to stay for the rest of the ceremony, since the inside was full:


I think about as many people were inside sitting down as were outside, not really watching the ceremony. I ended up deciding I was in the right place, but wasn't enjoying myself too much, not being able to see and not being interested anyway. Luckily Korean weddings are short, and the ceremony ended about 20 minutes after I arrived. At this point, professional photographers and guests were able to take photos:



A large group of the guests, including all of us teachers who showed up from Kate LA, were in a photo with the bride and groom. I don't have a copy of that, of course.

After the pictures were done, the couple retired and the guests took their buffet tickets downstairs for lunch. This was also a very unspecial facet of the event, as guests from all the weddings that finished within the same time frame were mixed in the same room and the same buffets. Leon (who overslept and didn't get there until the wedding was over) and I had to stand and eat with spoons, as there were no chopsticks left when we got in line, and no seats available at first when we had gotten our food. After a few minutes, a couple people near the column where we were standing left, and we got to sit down.



I wasn't too pleased with the buffet, but it was free food, so I filled up as best I could. We also had to rush out of there, because we had to get to a movie that we had tickets to. I've noticed that moviegoing has become a more popular activity here in Ulsan over the past several months; almost every time I go to the cinema now, any movies I want to see is sold out for the next four hours, or the next two days or something. It's kind of ridiculous. So this time I had tried to get tickets for us the day before and had to settle for a showtime almost dangerously close to the wedding end time. We made it in time, though.

In sum, I hope I don't have to go to any more Korean weddings.

Thanksgiving

I never got a chance to finish my Birth-Giving entry from November, so here's a quick rundown of the actual postbirthday Thanksgiving party. Because we had to do the meal on Saturday instead of Sunday this year (due to Heather working all day Sunday and only PART of Saturday), I had to spend I think three nights over the week, including my birthday, preparing food that could be refrigerated for a few days. I got to Heather's house early afternoon on Saturday to finish. My Estimated Time of Dinner was 7:00, but I knew I'd never make it.

Grace from work was supposed to come early and help me, but bailed at the last minute. It really pisses me off when someone offers to do something unbidden, then doesn't do it, with no warning. This happens a lot in Korea. Luckily Heather's daughter Kate enjoys helping me cook, and she had a friend with her, so I had a couple assistants for a little while.

I didn't make it such a production this year, because I didn't really have the money. It's expensive paying for pretty much the whole thing by yourself, even back home. Heather bought some of the ingredients and the chicken again this year, so that helped. It also took some weight off my shoulders that she bought the chicken preroasted. She said mine was good, but Costco's was better. Heather isn't known for her tact.

Anyway, here's a picture of the meal. We had chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, rolls, squash, deviled eggs (as appetizers), eggnog, and apple cider. Lee, one of the teachers from work, also brought wine, and Heather bought beer. I had also made cranberry sauce earlier in the week, but I goddamn forgot about it until the day after the meal. I was really mad, because it cost me like fifteen bucks to make. The flowers on the table were also from Lee--a gift to Heather for hosting. For dessert we had one of my leftover birthday cakes (the one I bought), chocolate cream pie with whipped cream, and this really awesome pumpkin pie I made with a recipe that called for vanilla ice cream in the filling. It came out so well that I was extremely pissed to find that when I went back to Heather's for some of the rest of the leftovers a night or two later (I had to walk home on Saturday, so I couldn't bring everything that night) and found that her father had eaten the rest of the first pie and all of the second. I've learned from this and other events that I should never leave things at Heather's if I want them back: they always end up, in whole or in part, lost or eaten.







About the same amount of people showed up as last year. All of the other foreign teachers came, except Moriah, who was back in the States for a few weeks, but the only Korean teacher who came was Lee, despite my having invited all of them, and a couple having seemed quite excited for the event. Oh, Korea. Other than that it was Heather's nuclear family, Kate's friend, and Heather's niece and nephew. I really love her nephew, Jiseok, although he was being quite saucy that night, trying to take my shirt off and other such inappropriateness. We all (sort of) joked he learned that kind of behavior from his father.

Lee and Leon, not really arm wrestling:


Heather said it took her the whole day on Sunday to clean up, I assume beyond the time she spent at work. Normally when I cook at someone's house, I clean up after myself, but I spent something like 15 hours and nearly 100,000 won to cook food for her family and employees, and was cleaning up as best I could as I went along, so I don't feel guilty about leaving a room full of dishes and messes. She insisted I leave it, anyway. I left quite a bit of leftovers for them, there, too, not to mention those exquisite pumpkin pies.

Leaving

I took another bus back to Phnom Penh on my last day in Cambodia. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the bus was a double-decker. I'd never been on one of those before.




I was even more pleasantly surprised to find out how incredibly spacious the inside was. I had room to stretch out my legs entirely.


Then reality set in when the bus pulled into the station in Sihanoukville and we all had to get out and get onto another double-decker bus.


The second bus had as little leg room as the buses I'd been on before, and I had trouble finding my seat because the seat number on my ticket was written so illegibly. Two people had to help me figure it out. The only advantage of this bus was that it had a bathroom, but I didn't have to use it, boooo-urns.

The bus broke down after about four hours and we stood around for a while. Then some of the passengers flagged down a taxi van and were going to make the last half hour of the trip in that. They had room for one more, so I hopped in. It only cost us a buck each.

I still had a couple hours before I needed to be at the airport, so I stopped at some random hole in the wall for a soda. It was not good. All the chairs were facing away from the street, too. I thought that was very strange, but then I saw that there was a tv at the back of the restaurant, but it wasn't on. The old lady of the place thought I was so precious.

At the airport they had one of those suite flatscreens in the check-in area, and I got to watch this movie in which Brittany Murphy learns to be a ramen chef in Japan. Then in Ho Chi Minh I got to watch No Country for Old Men. Then I went home. It was cold. I was pissed.