Pyeongchang? Pyeongnot!

So for Korean Lunar New Year this past Thursday though Sunday (Year of the Dog!) I went up to Seoul.  My plan was to travel to the Pyeongchang Olympics for two days, Friday and Saturday, then come home Sunday.

Well, I bought my event tickets in advance (a hockey game and aerial skiing, which were on the cheaper end of the price spectrum) with no problems.  But I waited on booking train or bus tickets.

Huge, awful mistake.

There was very little available to get me to Pyeongchang in the early afternoon (which, on a good day, is a three hour car-ride from Seoul).  Forget about getting there in the morning, i.e., on time for my tickets.  And there was literally nothing guaranteed to get me back from Pyeongchang.

So at best I could take a standing-only train ticket or a bus ticket, miss my event anyways, then worry about whether or not I could get back to Seoul.

Of course, I should have just coughed up the money for a hotel room in Pyeongchang itself but I didn't think it would be such a saga getting to and from Seoul.  And I figured spending a little time in the city I used to live in might be worth it as well.

Alas, I hanged out in Itaewon eating lots of non-Korean food and reading and taking the Seoul subway I used to ride nearly every day when I first came here.

I was truly disappointed at first, but then decided to just roll with it.  At night I went to shitty foreigner bars and watched the Olympics on TV.

I won the gold medal for rolling with it.  And I admit, I miss Seoul sometimes, especially when it comes to food options.

Olympic Opening Ceremony Hot-Tweet

Mike Pence's mind right now: white country, shithole country, white country, shithole country... #OpeningCeremony

— "Stable Genius" James (@wetcasements) February 9, 2018

Here We Go

I bought my tickets for the Pyeongchang Olympics a few days ago.  By Korean standards, the website was very easy to use.  By international standards, it was only a bit of train-wreck but I could use it in Chrome which was pretty mind-blowing.

I'll be going for two days and seeing a) a US men's hockey match, b) two rounds, male and female, of aerial skiing, and c) the finals of the women's Super-G skiing event.

I wanted to try and see an event where South Korea had a good shot at medaling (basically, short-track skating) but those events were incredibly expensive (over 200 bucks).  The tickets I got weren't exactly cheap either, but I'm excited.

Kind of a Big Deal

North and South Korea, while competing separately, will march under the joint "Unification Flag" at the upcoming Pyeongchang Olympics next month.

The history of the flag is fascinating:

"The flag was first used in 1991 when the two countries competed as a single team in the 41st World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba, Japan and the 8th World Youth Football Championship in Lisbon, Portugal. The two countries' teams marched together under the flag in the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia; the 2002 Asian Games in Busan, South Korea; the 2003 Summer Universiade in Daegu, South Korea; the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece; the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy; and the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar; however, the two countries competed separately in sporting events. The flag was not used in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. Not only was a unified team shelved, even Beijing Olympics Organization Committee (BOCOG)'s plan to make the two Korean teams turn up back to back during the opening ceremony was rejected due to opposition by the North Korean delegation at the last moment."

By my "stable genius" math skills, this will be the eighth time it's been used officially.

Flag-wise, I love the colors but am kind of put off by how damn literal the thing is.  It's downright Rorschachian.

Ugh

any white person writing about any city in Asia: "It's a city of contrasts, old and new, traditional and modern, at times hectic but also serene...."

— "Stable Genius" James (@wetcasements) January 11, 2018

I'm stoked for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics next month (I'll be going for two or three days) but not so much for how Western media always covers Asia -- it's so fucking cliche by now.

As if New York or London aren't also massively contrasting and /or contradictory. That's how big cities work, always.