Korean Baseball Game

On Saturday morning, Colin, Rich, Jarred, and I caught the 10:50 train to Gwangju, a city that's an hour and a half south of us. We arrived at 12:30 and jumped in a cab to the Kia Tiger's Baseball Stadium. It was opening day and our first Korean baseball game. Now, the first difference is that there were a lot of random people outside of the stadium who had set up tables and were selling drinks, beer, chicken, dried squid, and the inflatable bangers to cheer the team on. So, we bought our chicken, beer, and bangers (decided against the dried squid) and followed the crowd into the stadium area. The second difference....where the heck do we buy tickets?! There was a big line which we got into, but it was for people who had bought tickets online. No one seemed to know what we were talking about. Luckily, we spotted another foreigner (who was also wearing a UF baseball cap) and asked him. He said that unfortunately the game was sold out (OMG), but the chicken ladies had tickets we could get tickets from, but we'd have to buy more chicken. So we ran out back to the front and we were going to each table saying "Tickets?" and then they would say "Yes! Chicken!" Nooo! Two different words! Luckily, we saw one lady selling her two tickets, and then a chicken lady had two tickets, but yes we did have to buy more chicken.

So we ran back in, and finally headed into the actual stadium. The third difference....General admission at an opening day baseball game? Pure chaos. It looked like every seat had been filled so I was going up and down all the aisles looking for empty seats. At this point, I got really annoyed. Luckily, Colin noticed that four seats had bags on them. I would have assumed they were saved for people, but Colin asked the high school boys sitting behind those seats, and they were just using the seats for their stuff! So we thankfully got seats, but it took me a while to calm down from everything.

The fourth difference...The excitement, songs, chants, and cheerleaders! I have never seen so much excitement at a baseball game before. Everyone was singing, hitting their bangers, and shouting. An ajumma came by and led some chants. We offered our abundance of chicken to the people around us and made some friends. One man even gave us a pack of beef jerkey, yum! I made friends with the high school girls in our section and they gave me ice cream. After the first general shock and chaos of everything, it was a wonderful and exciting day!

Because we were in a bigger city, after the game we went for Indian food and a few drinks at their foreign bar. We caught the 11 o'clock train back to Iksan, the end of a very fun spring day!