BASEBALL GAME

I went to my first baseball game ever last night!  One of my professors is acquainted with the president of the Doosan Bears so he was able to get us some pretty nice tickets as well as giving us the opportunity to meet the president and see his headquarters underneath the stadium.  The Doosan Bears are one of Seoul's two baseball teams (LG Twins) and their home stadium is Jamsil Stadium, which is the one we went to last night.  The president gave our whole class (our professor took the whole class) baseball caps with the signature 'D' of Doosan as gifts which was nice. The one below is the women's style, but I actually prefer the men's style - navy, red and white - but I'm still happy.  It was free!! Hehe...

Baseball's not really big in Australia, so I've never been too eager about the sport, but it's so different when you're in the stadium.  There are so many team chants and songs that the fans know, and then for each individual player the music speaker thing plays a different introduction song.  It's hard not to get excited when you have a thousand people behind screaming and singing along.  I couldn't really make out what they were saying in some of the chants, but there were two which I ended up following along with:

"(name of player) 안타 anta!"  = 'whoever' hit!
"(name of player) 홈런 homreon!" = 'whoever' home run! 

There are also matching clap rhythm pattern ...things...which go with these cheers, but it's difficult to write out.  The best way to learn is to actually go to a game.  It's pretty easy to pick up.  

And no baseball game is complete with three things: cheerleaders, the one guy and 'thunder sticks'.  The cheerleaders came out during the break times when the teams were switching from batting to fielding, and they danced to a lot of the recent pop songs e.g. Girl's Day, C.N. Blue and Kan Mi Yeon.  I really would not want to be a cheerleader, personally, because it gets kind of cold at night time and all they were wearing were mini-tops and mini-skirts.  Anyway, the 'one guy' I'm talking about is this one guy, dressed in the team uniform, who has a whistle and leads all the fans to cheer by blowing on his whistle.  The fans obviously know what his whistle patterns indicate, because they would always burst into a song when the one guy blows his whistle a particular way.  He's also kind of the atmosphere maker during the match.  And thunder sticks are those two plastic sticks puffed up with airs, and when you hit them they make a loud, superficial clapping sound.  Very effective and hand-friendly.