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

Drink

Listen: Koreans like to drink. The first night I was here I went for a walk down the road and back, and stepped over several guys in suits passed out on steps. This was a Sunday. After a 80 hour week at the office though you'd want to pour as much as you could down your neck. That was in Suyu, and while Junggye has less of that, there's still a very tangible culture here. Despite this the bars, in this area at least are pretty thin on the ground and never packed, which in my books is a good thing.

But this is the thing: you can buy alcohol 24 hours a day from any convenience store, and to give you an idea of their prevalence, there are at least 10 of them within a five minute walk of my apartment, open all day every day. The majority of these stores have tables and chairs outside, inviting you to buy a few bottles and enjoy them bathed in the neon lights of the store. The selling point is that you can get a 1.6 litre bottle of Cass or Hite for about £2.50. And soju is even cheaper. I've resisted going down the soju route so far, though. I've seen the consequences. Plus it tastes like toilet duck. I just read this on wikipedia:

More than 3 billion bottles were consumed in South Korea in 2004.[3] In 2006, it was estimated that the average adult Korean (older than 20) had consumed 90 bottles of soju during that year, with each bottle equivalent to seven shots.

And this sounds like suicide:

Despite tradition, soju is not always consumed in unmixed form. A poktanju (lit: "bomb drink,") consists of a shot glass of soju dropped into a pint of draft beer (like a boilermaker) and is drunk quickly. The reverse equivalent, a shot glass of draft beer dropped into a pint of soju, is called suso poktanju (lit: "hydrogen bomb drink").

Nowon is a short bus/taxi ride away and has a lot more going on. Though when I went last night with my coworker Sean with the intention of finding a club, we wandered haphazardly and fruitlessly around for a while before getting turned away from a place because we weren't Korean. Rather than making the point that that's a bit racist, we just went home. It would seem that the GI-saturated meatfest that is Itaewon is the top choice for a proper night out. Not that I'm much of a clubber anyway, as you probably know, but you crave the bright lights once in a while.

So, OK, wrap this up now. Conclusion: I drink more here than I'm used to. Had a couple of stinking hangovers at first, lost whole days after getting in at 6am and it really can't be beneficial to my health or my skin, but, interestingly, I think I've lost weight. Work that one out.