Saturday sucked, Sunday spectacular

well that's the two halves of my weekend.

Thursday night I think I ate something that didn't agree with me, as I woke up Friday morning feeling very ill. At first I thought it was the fact that I'd had a couple of beers the night before, but since I'd had nothing near enough to make me this sick I knew something else was wrong. I quickly realised that the nacho's I had had, that I thought had tasted funny anyway, were in fact made from the Korean butter-bread and so were laced with dairy. This led to me taking my first sick day since coming to SEI and luckily it was a Friday, or I'd have had to take two. This had me flat on my back for Saturday as well. I finally ate again Saturday night, and woke up Sunday feeling VERY hungry. So I went out and got a huge breakfast and I was on my way.

Sunday afternoon I had planned to see the Samsung Lions, the local ball-club. I discussed Korean baseball in a previous post and so won't bother again here. We were playing the Doosan Bears, one of the Seoul teams. It was a great game and great afternoon. Actually the seating is general admission so we got there a bit early to get seats along the first base line. Other people were sitting at ground level in the outfield.... can't imagine you see much out there. Anyway it was a good game. After some 9th inning drama, when a single homer made a 5-3 game 5-4, the Lions closer shut down the top of their lineup to clinch the win. It was a great game in great weather.

After the game we went to a local restaurant. Actually, we had decided to go the other way from the main crowd, thinking that a slightly longer walk to the EMart would get us a taxi faster. On the way though, we decided to stop in for dinner at a place behind the parking lot (where the business district picked up). When we went in the woman asked us "Doosan?" so we told her that we had been at the game. She then took us upstairs where there were seats set up for a small banquet. We then realized that the Doosan Bears were coming in for dinner. I think she realized her mistake too and put us off in teh corner. Sure enough, 10 minutes later they all came in. We smiled and said hi but they looked unimpressed. There was a white guy though so my buddy Kurt went up to him and politely asked him where he was from. He was a kid from Ohio who had come over in March for spring training and was playing a season in Korea. He actually looked quite happy to be speaking English again and was very sociable. However, 10 minutes later they were paid up and out the door with the team bus ready to go back to Seoul for a game today. I wish we'd had more of a chance to talk to him, but oh well.

While the games themselves are not exactly MLB standard they are actually better than I had previously given them credit for being. It's not like the soccer that even the Koreans find hard to watch. While I'd still put my money on the Yankees if such a matchup ever occurred, it's definitely of a higher quality than my local Vancouver Canadians.