World Cup Fever

Lucky for us, World Cup fever has never died here in Korea. Before we left, Jenn's dad gave us some advice for soccer season. He told us to find out the team favoured by our community and follow them: learn who the players are; go to home games and buy a big foam finger to show your team spirit; get excited about their winning record (if they have one). That sort of stuff. I guess this is the travel advice we should expect from a guy who lives and breathes Juventus. This weekend we did all of that, except there were no big foam fingers, only blow-up sledge hammers. We found out that our local team is the Suwon Samsung Bluewings (sort of a combination of the Red Wings and the Blue Jays. There mascot was some sort of blue jay type bird). If you remember from one of our previous blogs, Suwon is the walled city that has the Hwaseong Fortress. There is also an enormous World Cup Stadium that seats 45,000. They actually built 10 of these stadiums in different locations throughout South Korea when the World Cup was going on. It's quite an impressive display for soccer fans. And the Koreans take their soccer seriously.

The national league is called The K-League and there are 12 teams from around the country. Team dedication usually goes by province; we are in the biggest province and there are a few different teams, so we picked the one closest to our home. Suwon is just over 1 hour away by bus, so we hopped that bus on Sunday. We got excellent seats, almost at centre field, 4 rows from the front. Tickets were only $12. This persective shows how close we were, as well as all the 25,000 odd empty seats.

The stadium wasn't full, maybe about 15,000 fans, but it was rowdy. And it was the playoffs which made the stadium have an extra buzz of excitement. There was one area with all the fanatic fans decked out in blue. They were singing and banging drums the entire game, they were extremely dedicated to making as much noise as possible for the whole 90 minutes of the game. They had some really lively chants, one particularly memorable one was sung to the tune of "Yellow Submarine."

In the playoffs, the Bluewings (or "our team" as we have started calling them) are ranked 5th and their opponents, the Pohang Steelers, are ranked 7th. Our team dominated the whole game and we won 2-0. And let me say, anyone who's seen a goal being scored on a televised game knows how crazy it is, well it's absolutely out-of-control exciting to see a goal being scored at a live game. The place goes bonkers.