MIKA! MIKA! I WENT TO SEE MIKA! (and also World Cup ROK-Greece)

MIKA LIVE IN SEOUL. Yes, Virginia, this will be a photo dump.


Saturday woke up grey and rainy. Perfect weather for staying inside and having a Glee or Battlestar Galactica marathon, but I had other plans. You see, Saturday was The Day. The day I had been waiting for for several months - MIKA was playing a concert in Seoul. So a friend of mine grabbed our umbrellas and headed for Olympic Park, the centerpiece of the 1988 Summer Olympic Games and what I am sure is a lovely place to walk around when the weather's not quite so crappy.

You can see it was raining. A lot.

But that did not deter hoards of Mika fans from showing up and going crazy!

Except, of course for the people in my section, who seemed to have taken an entire bottle of Ambien EACH before the concert. Everyone else was up on their feet except for them. My friend and I were not just the only two foreigners in the section, but we were also the only two up on our feet for the entire show.

This is the giant cankle that rose from the crowd during the performance of Big Girls (You Are Beautiful).

And now some performance shots:





Final bows after the encore (Grace Kelly):



And now for the World Cup! Korea vs Greece - and Korea ran ALL OVER Greece. Great times.


Here we are, decked out in our Reds gear. We were one of only a handful of weigooks to stay for the game afterwords


A bit smaller crowd for the game, but it sounded about 10 times louder. ESPECIALLY when Park Jisung scored the goal to put Korea up 2-0. It was like the second coming


And here is a terrible shot of the jumbo screens we watched the game on. All in all, a great experience.

World Cup Update

Alright folks just wanted to post a quick update of my experience watching the World Cup in Korea. I'll have photos from the game (and the Mika concert yay!) tomorrow probably.

So last night was South Korea's first match of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, against Greece, so the country basically stopped dead in its tracks to watch the game. And when I say stopped dead in its tracks, I mean there is not a single human being I have spoken to in this country who did not watch the match last night. And most watched with about seventy billion other Koreans, all dressed in red, cheering and going crazy during the game.

Me, I was at a concert beforehand in Olympic Park, so we decided to stay and watch the game there. As it began, the concert venue seemed oddly empty - probably because nearly every person in Seoul was at City Hall, from what I have been told. I was honestly a little disappointed...I was really hoping for one of those everyone-on-top of each other, massive crowd events, but pretty much everyone had a seat during the game.

My concerns were quickly allayed, however, when Korea scored its first goal unit (or whatever it's called). There were maybe 500-600 people there, but the roars that erupted from the crowd made it feel like ten times that. The atmosphere was electric, with cheers of "Daehan Minguk! clapclap clapclap clap" erupting every few seconds, and it was easy to fall into the game. And when the clock ran out, and Korea had won 2-0, it felt like they'd won the Super Bowl, or the World Series. But not the NBA Finals or the Stanley Cup, because who gives a crap about hockey and basketball?? Whatever.

So you can be sure that I will be wearing my red for the games against Argentina and Nigeria, who look to be the real tests for the Red Devils. But I cannot wait! Daehan Minguk!

Oh, also, I really REALLY want a vuvuzela. NEW LIFE GOAL.

PS Yes, Tom. I AM better at the internet than you. HOW DOES THAT FEEL, BIATCH!!

Obligatory World Cup Post

Being an American living in a Foreign Land where soccer (or "football" as some people call it for indiscernible reasons) is a big deal, it is mandatory that one writes a post on the World Cup, should it happen while you are in town. The reason for this is, I think, that we as Americans really only have limited reference for just how big a deal this is in other countries. It's sort of like ((Super Bowl - commercials)(Olympics + poor people))^3.

And I'm not even sure you can really equate it. It's like trying to convert apples to oranges, or kilograms to pounds. You just can't do it! Also, I'm pretty skittish around "math" so you're going to have to cut me some slack here.

Anyway, since it IS World Cup time, you should probably know that, yes, I will be watching at least one of the games in a crowded area filled with crazed South Koreans shouting "Daehan Minguk!" And I will post pictures once this happens. I have my Red Devils shirt all ready to go and everything!

One of the other things that inevitably happens anytime Americans get even remotely involved in soccer is that certain wingnuts tend to write intellectually void articles proclaimint soccer to be "fundamentally un-American" or "something Real AmericansTM could never get behind" or even "socialist." Yes, this last one somehow happens. I won't link to the articles themselves (because really all they are is link bait to generate traffic to their respective sites), but if you want read through the Gawker article. The links are there, and they check out.

Perhaps the most "coherent" of the Rube Goldberg arguments I have heard came from author Chuck Klosterman, who claimed that soccer, at its heart, was fundamentally a team sport, while beloved American pastimes such as baseball and football were far more individualist - and therefore, in line with the American mode of thought. His reasoning goes, you can envision a single player winning a baseball or football game, but this is somehow not possible in soccer. I can't even begin to tell you where that goes wrong...is it his willful ignorance of the cooperation amongst players in baseball in football? Or the fact that a single person could win a soccer match in the exact same way that someone could win a football game on his own (which, by the way, would be INFINITELY easier than one person winning a baseball game)? Suffice it to say, his intellectual train jumped the track several stops back.

(PS for my non-American readers, should any of you be actual, live humans, football here refers to American football. Not soccer, or Aussie rules, or whatever else you might have)

Look, ultimately these articles that get written every four years are only put out there so the author can generate some name traffic - even if people are talking about how ridiculous it is, they are still talking. But still. These days, when it's fashionable to call every bogeyman a socialist (a term which has lost all political meaning, thanks TEA PARTY), it's worth expending just the tiniest bit of critical thought to understand just how ridiculous those claims are.

And anyway, I hope that wherever you are, be it America, South Korea, or the Socialist Colony of Moon, you will join the other 7 billion humans on the planet and I in participating in this most socialist of events, the FIFA World Cup. Let's Go Reds!