The 3 S's to Success: Sun, Soccer, and, of course, Soju

Well, I had an interesting day off yesterday. This whole weekend is some sort of Korean Independence day, or something like it. I had Friday off from school, and as usual, I didn't find out about the day off until Thursday. So much for making advanced plans. Anyways, on Thursday Mr. Jeong asked me if I wanted to come along to the soccer club's tournament games on Friday. Apparently, the team is in a Gyeonggi province soccer tourney,and Friday's games were to advance to the round of 16. I said yes, as I had nothing else to do and I thought that maybe I might get to play. Granted, I didn't expect to play as I'm sure a tourney as well organized as this one has rosters and what not that have to be followed. So off we headed to Suwon to kick some other town's ass. Upon arriving at the field I was amazed to find that we were playing on something other than a dirt field. As much as I hate the composite turf/carpet fields, this was still an improvement over dirt. Not surprisingly, I didn't get to play but that really didn't matter, as the team won both games despite a major refing snafu that led to a stoppage of play and our team arguing for 10 minutes at least....frankly, I'm not sure how most of the team didn't get tossed. The other team played a ball through to the forward, who was flagged offside by the line judge, so our entire team stopped playing. What they didn't see was the referee quickly wave off the line judge and issue no "Play on" or any indication that play was to continue. So our goalie kicked the ball casually back to where the free kick would be taken for the offside and the other team's forward easily took the ball and dribbled into the goal. Everybody threw a shit fit. It was pretty fucking sweet. Again, I'm not sure how that ref didn't either get his head smashed in or deal out any cards...weird. While, I didn't get to play, it's true, I was treated to lunch with the rest of the team fans: beer and fried chicken. We actually ordered out and sure enough, eventually a guy showed up on moped with our grub. After this substantial lunch, we headed back home to Yangpyeong for lunch? Yeah, that's right. After eating my fill at 2:00pm, I was treated to a large lunch/dinner at 5:00pm. The team sat around munching on budejige (ham, onions, peppers, and instant ramen mixed together in a stew of sorts) and takdoritang (same stew set up as before, this time with entire chicken drumsticks, breasts, etc. thrown in) while sipping much soju. After about 2 hours of this, the group insisted I head with them over to a restaurant owned by one of the players and was treated to a couple pitchers of beer. All of this delicious food and drink, as usual, on someone else's tab. Plus I got to take home all the leftover taktoritang. Yum. I can't wait till I can actually communicate with these guys. They all seem like a good time.