Korea Day 4 - The National Sport of Korea

The next morning we got up with the intention of going on a tour of the other big palace in Seoul before our train. We had decided the previous day to go to a little island that we just noticed on a map called Ulleungdo. The person at our hotel said he didn't think he had ever heard of a tourist going there which was recommendation enough. To get there we had to take a train to the city of Pohang and then get a boat. The boats only left pretty early in the morning so the plan was to take a train to Pohang at night then catch the boat the next morning. After being in China the ease at which the Korean train system worked was a huge relief. We were able to buy round trip tickets in advanced that even involved a stop in a third city. That right, I was actually able to buy a ticket for a city I was no physically in. Ah, the marvels of modern technology. In the morning though it was raining so we decided not to go on the tour since it would be all outside. Instead we just had lunch at some little place and then walked around a tourist street for a while. It was the sort of stuff you'd expect a lot of hand crafted things and nick knacks. There was one guy selling a flute like instrument which was fairly interesting but I wasn't able to find him later when I was thinking of buying it. We had been having problems with alarms as even though a phone would work OK the fact that we couldn't get a signal meant that our phones ran through all there power really quickly looking for one and would be out of power by the next morning when we needed it.

We went over to the mall we had been in the other day to try and find a portable alarm clock. It was a pretty big mall but we had a really hard time finding what we wanted. When we finally found someone selling them the prices were way too high and we didn't end up buying one. Since we were back in the place with the "e-Sports Stadium" we decided to see what they were up to this time. Unlike last time where the place was mostly empty besides the contestants and crew this time it was packed to the gills and standing room only. The difference was that unlike the previous day when they had been playing some shooter they were now playing Starcraft. Starcraft is basically the national sport of Korea. A computer game created by the US company Blizzard, also the makers of the huge in China World of Warcraft, Starcraft is a game where two players build little soldiers to control resources on a map and then crush the other player. It was a very popular game in the US when it came out too and I played for a number of years, but all that was about a decade ago. While it has essentially faded into obscurity in America Starcaft is still huge in Korea. I've seen videos of whole stadiums packed to watch two people play this game, and the really large crowd we saw was certainly a testimonial to that. I know the game somewhat but was not really able to follow it on the level they play it. There was also a team of announcers who I'm sure helped explain things but were yelling in excited Korea.

We couldn't stay too long as we had to make our train. The train station was much nicer and less crowded than any in China, remember that Seoul is as big a pretty much any Chinese city. The train was nice as were the seats and it never really got crowded. There was even a food car that sold a fairly good sandwich. The train was also a lot quieter as no one loudly listened to music and one train attendant even shushed me and Ken once. Oddly enough no one ever actually checked our tickets the whole time, though they're often only barely checked in China. When we got to Pohang we went down to near where the boat left from and walked around looking at hotels. It was past nine or ten so when we got to the reception of a lot of the hotels the people were sleeping behind the counter. There wasn't exactly a lot of English being spoken in this town but using the book to look up the word for beds helped. I didn't want to stay at the first place since they only had one bigger bed instead of two smaller ones and I don't really like sharing a bed that much. We tried a few other places that had a similar story until we came to the Rich Motel. We found a older Korean man behind the counter who showed us around. We asked about a room with two beds and he brought us to one which was actually a gorgeous room with an extra living room area and a computer. The price was too high though so we asked about a room with one bed. He had that also but it was still more than the other places. We were going to leave when he cut the price down to the same as the other places.

Figuring that we were here and the room was nice we said we'd take it. We went down to the front desk to pay and as we were just about to he cut the price on the room with the double beds again until it was only a little more expensive than the single bed. We agreed and paid. Ken though had left his backpack in the room with one bed and fearing that the door was locked wanted the guy to take us back there. Now we had been communicating all this time only by writing numbers down and using about three words of Korean so saying that we had forgotten a backpack was well beyond us. Ken tried to hit the number of the floor with the single room but the guy kept unpushing the button and telling us no. Finally it actually became something of a struggle with me and Ken trying to push the button while he held us off. I'll say this he may have been 80 and five foot nothing but he was really strong. We're both also laughing at this point as we've somehow gotten into a wrestling match with a Korean octogenarian. Finally I'm just able to push the button as we reach the floor and we get off only to discover that the room is unlocked and we can get the backpack. Finally realizing what we wanted he profusely apologizes and we go to the correct room. Before we went to bed that night we were flipping around the channels which besides containing a really odd porn channel, contains two channels of nothing but games of Starcraft. After watching for a few minutes I realize that one of the games is the one we watched earlier that day. So we weren't just watching professional video games we were watching the big leagues.