Korean Baseball and TV Screens
Baseball
While in Korea, I had the chance to go to a professional baseball game. I don't often get to see live sporting events and have never seen one in a foreign country. It was a little hard to tell how the quality of play compares to the US, but for entertainment value it was one of the most fun games I've ever been to. I've never left a baseball game in the US with my ears ringing. I only got through the 7th inning of this game between the Doosan Bears and the LG Twins, but the entire affair was so loud that it took a long subway ride home before I could hear well again. And oh my god the headache! I had 7 beers at a Yankee game last year and not one at this game, but the noise left my head pounding! Even more impressive about the noise was that the stadium was only about half full and the game was pretty meaningless in the standings. I can't imagine how loud it would have been if there was something important on the line with full crowd there.
The KBO teams are all owned and named after the major corporations (Doosan is a large conglomerate with dozens of divisions and LG is an electronics maker). I'm not sure how the fan loyalties develop since these two particular teams both play in Seoul. There's even a third team in Seoul that plays in different stadium. The Bears and Twins both play home games in the stadium shown in the video. These teams are somewhat like the Yankees and Mets, with the Doosan Bears playing the role of the Yankees. When I was buying my ticket, the sales person was trying to give me an option, but I wasn't able to understand what the choices were. Once I got into the seating area, I understood that she had offered me the choice between the Doosan side or the Twins side of the stadium. She gave me the Doosan side after I told to just give me whatever she thought was best. I can't see that it mattered much since I don't follow the league anyway. I'm sure I would have had just as good a time on the LG side.
Anyway, here's some footage of the game. It hopefully conveys the experience better than I can describe it. (If you are reading this on Facebook, you probably can't see the video and will have to come directly to the blog. Sorry. You might try Youtube too.)
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TVs
The Koreans love their TV's. It's not hard to understand why. Not only are they a tremendous source of income (and probably pride) for the country, but they offer a little privacy for a people who don't get too much. It took me a while to notice, but I finally realized that they have TV's everywhere you look. Dozens of them. I tried videotaping them to make a compilation, but it was too much work to get them all. Missing from this video are the 30" flatscreens in the conveniences store windows, the 5" LCD's running sales ads in the aisles of E-mart and Lotte Mart, the really small LCD's in the credit card machines at most check out counters, the 10" and 15" screens spread out in most subway cars, and the 7" LCD's in cabs that have GPS and live TV feeds (for the important baseball games) just to point out a few I missed. So this video mostly shows the billboard size TV's, of which there's lots. Almmost every large corner is a small scale Times Square.
The content on these screens is pretty entertaining too, but I REALLY didn't have time to take a sampling of that. Suffice to say that there is some weird stuff on Korean broadcast television.
Click here for the blog, here for the Youtube
The last moment in the TV video reminds me of the scene in Oceans 11 when basher is watching the television coverage of the casino being dynamited, while if he just did a 180 he could see it happen in person from his hotel room window.
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