Olympic fever

Korea loves Olympics. Maybe it's a consequence of the 1988 games, which if you don't know were held here in 1988, but they are hard to avoid. For me this is a good thing: I love Olympics. I love watching sports I've never heard of, I love flags. Everything... I ignore the politics. People watch the games on the subway on their TV phones, shops have portable TVs behind the counter or outside on a pile of crates, which allows a crowd to form during a really tense point in the ping pong or something. You can watch weightlifting while you eat your galbi or go for a drink and watch some badminton. In fact badminton won out over the Premier League in the local sports bar. Given how popular English football is here I was quite surprised.

Interesting thing is though, every single one of my kids, boys and girls, age 5-11, are transfixed by the games. They can name pretty much all the Korean medal winners, from swimming to archery to women's weightlifting. All of them can. I have to repeatedly stop them from talking about Park Tae Hwan and Chang Mi Ran and get back on topic. I can remember the Barcelona Olympics when I was seven, and maybe watching Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell, but doubt I was aware of what was going on elsewhere. I'm impressed anyway - I think it's good that these guys are aware of what's going on in the world. I made a bet with a kid last Thursday that GB would end up above Korea in the medals table. I was starting to get a bit scared before the weekend, but it's looking better now. Mmmmm.

Feeling olympicsy, I wandered down to the Seoul Olympic Park on Saturday. It being Saturday, it rained. Here are some pictures.



I did say my kids are aware of world issues. Well, not in all aspects. Having read a picturebook about how everyone in the world is fundamentally the same and that, I discussed with my advanced kindergarten class different parts of the world. I asked what people were like outside of Korea, and my kids talked about Britain, America, China and um, Guam. When I brought Africa up, little Jenny piped up: "People from Africa are very very very different and they are dark and I don't ever want to meet them because I don't like them." Had to nip that little bit of racism in the bud...

Here are two of Korea's biggest Olympic heroes: Park Tae Hwan (weiring the world's greatest shorts) and Jang Mi-ran (big weightlifting lady).
One way to humiliate a badly behaved boy is to accuse him of being in love with Jang Mi-ran. One way to embarrass a badly behaved girl is to accuse her of having a crush on Park Tae Hwan. :D

Korean swimming commentry

To my delight they just played this again (see post from the 10th of August). I had my camera to hand, so here's the last 150 metres of olympic babo-ness* from the swimming cube. The epic music at the end really completes it, don't you think?

*babo is Korean for 'crazy', taken literally in this country to mean 'mentally retarded', but I still call my kids babo all the time.

Post script: while uploading that I saw an advert for a mobile phone company using that footage. They got that out damn quickly - it only happened yesterday!

Misc

In the absence of anything all that interesting to write about, I'm going to cover several unconnected events that have happened in the week just gone.

1. Today I noticed, when sitting outside Little Jakob's, that there is a bright swastika sign above my window. The whole hakenkreuz as not a nazi thing idea is something you get used to quickly. Still just a touch disconcerting, though.
You'll have to click on the picture for a closer view.

2. It's really really hot. The weather said it was 36 degrees today. I took a nice shady walk to Nowon earlier. Took about half an hour. Wisely got the 1142 bus back. Here's a bus! And some shade!


3. The Olympics. Yesterday I was a bit hungover, and spent pretty much all day supine on the sofa,watching the olympiad. All the best events too: mainly judo, shooting, women's handball, basketball and fencing. When Korea won gold in judo, I had the window open and a roar that was, considering that we're talking about judo, very loud indeed, came up from the galbi place downstairs. We won in the swimming today as well. I'm trying to find a video of the commentary because it was awesome. Reminded me of that commentator's moment of climax screaming when Steve Redgrave won his gold in 2000.

4. I had chicken galbi on Friday. That was quite nice.

5. Woman. There's a woman that works on my road, clearing boxes from the shops, sweeping, generally keeping the place in order. She looks I'd say 70, or older, and I'm pretty sure she works every day of the week from dawn until very late at night. I see her every morning on the way to school, and I can often see her from my window after midnight, still diligently tidying. Here's a picture of her tidying diligently after midnight.

6. Before I finished this post I was invited out to a DVD bang*, but couldn't find it and ended up in a different bang: norae. This of course necessitated soju, which on a Sunday night may prove foolhardy. I'm now watching the community shield.
*As noraebang is singing room, DVD bang is, well, guess. I'll discuss at length another day. This post is too long already.