Korean baseball games, festivals, and racism?

Imagine this scenario for me: You're in the U.S. (easy enough), we'll say Costa Mesa, and a shiny, new apartment building has just been completed, advertising nice, spacious rooms. There's just one catch...these rooms are only available to "non-foreigners". In other words, if you're Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Latin, Arabian, or from any other number of countries, you aren't allowed to rent an apartment in this building.I wonder how well that would go over?

I ask you to imagine this scenario because my co-workers and I have just been refused accommodation in one such new building, because we are foreigners. It's actually pretty funny. Our boss convinced the male owner that we would be good tenants, and secured the four of us apartments in the building. Three days later, we're back at work after the weekend, and our boss tells us that the owners wife is refusing to let foreigners live in the building, so no apartments for us. While I was initially somewhat shocked by this, it does save me from a decision I was supposed to make- whether to move now or wait until January. I'm starting to feel at home in my tiny shoe box apartment and I love the area (is it bad that I feel safer here because my boss doesn't like or get along with the landlady?), so I wasn't sold on moving out just yet. If I wait until January (which looks inevitable now), I will move into the apartment that Paula (my friend and co-worker) lives in now, as her contract will be up in January.

Now...on to less comical subjects, like baseball. This past weekend, I went with three other friends of mine to a baseball game in Busan. Baseball is pretty big in Korea and I hear they do well internationally, too. I'd been wanting to see a game here for awhile, and it's the playoffs so my chances were running out, so we decided this was the weekend to go. All the tickets were already sold out so we had to scalp some. That in itself was a great experience. The main entrance was surrounded by police officers and extremely crowded. We weren't sure where to look for tickets so stood there looking lost, until a Korean man came up to us and pointed up to the next level. When we got there, there was a whole group of old Korean men, all trying to sell tickets. When we approached them they chose one amongst the to deal with us. The guy told us to follow him to a different area, and then asked for the money, telling us we'd get the tickets at the entrance gate. Don't worry, we're smarter than that. We went back to where the group of old men were gathered and made motions until they realized we wanted to see our tickets first. Another old man motioned for us to follow him to yet another area, and handed us four tickets, grabbed our money, andhurried off. As we were approaching the entrance, we realized that the date on one of the tickets was two days earlier. We went back in search of the man but he was no where to be found and the others refused to switch tickets with us. We decided to try and get in anyway, and succeeded, at least into the first section before entering the actual stadium.

When we tried to get into the stadium, no one seemed to know what gate we should be at. We were first directed to go up and after going up, were sent back down, then left, right, etc. About five gates later we were finally in the stadium and searching for seats. This was also confusing since we couldn't read anything that was written on our tickets, so we just claimed three seatsin a very nice section, and sat there forabout two innings before getting kicked out and herded over to where the general admission ticket holders were supposed tobe. Of course by this time there were no seats, so we stuck to the stairs. The game was fairly exciting (for a baseballgame) and we got to witness a fight between a couple Korean fans and the officials/police...the fans won (and while being led out of the stadium continued to push the officials around with no consequences). It's interesting to me that Korean police officers seem to have no power here, yet you never see any crime and I never feel threatened here. Anyway, back to the game. Another funny thing is that it is trendy for women here to wear "Minnie Mouse" type ears to all events they attend. There were plenty of these at the game. Another difference between the experience here and how it would be in America- instead of hot dogs and cracker jacks, the staple baseball snack is driedsquid...mmmmm.

As for the festivals, I've just attended my first here in Korea, and have gone back for three days now. It's a lantern festival at the river, to commemorate the time in the 1500's when Japan was invading the Jinju castle and the Korean soldiers inside the castle used lanterns tocommunicate with their soldiers outside of the castle. Now it's a huge festival with big lit up characters on the river, thousands of lanterns everywhere, festival food (I've had the Turkish kebabs, Korean overpriced crab, cinnamon pancake, and strawberry choc. chip ice cream..all very good), along with hundreds of shops/stalls selling everything imaginable. There is also a stage with various acts going on at all times(we witnessed some Korean drummers in costumes and some latin dancers "movin it"-guys in tight sparkly leggings and girlsin tiny skirts and bikinis), and fireworks on a couple of the nights. Overall a fun experience :). I'll have to cut this "short" as I'm being ordered to go home and search for our co-worker/my neighbor who didn't show up to work today and hasn't answered any phone calls.