Baseball!!! Cheeseburgers!!! Yay, America!

Yep -- went to the ballpark on Sunday. It was awesome! The home team won, which is always fun. Final score was (I believe) LG Twins 5, SK Wyverns 3. Something like that, anyway. There were a couple homeruns, the crowd going wild, all that. Here are some fun things that are pretty different from ballgames in the states:

• Cheerleaders. Oh my, yes... good ones too.
• Every batter for the home team has a personalized song or cheer when they come up to the plate. All the fans sing along. There's also like an MC (with a stage and everything right behind us) who hops around and yells and leads all the songs. My favorite -- this Venezuelan player whose song was the Macarena... hey, Petagine!
• Beer is cheap -- a tall boy (or Korean equivalent) costs 3000 won -- less than $2.50 a pop. Win.
• Dried squid is awesome with beer, it turns out.
• You can buy KFC and Burger King inside the stadium. I didn't, but the couple we met there brought some chicken in with them, so I did eat fried chicken. Oh yeah -- I saw people carrying in whole pizzas too. Strange food for a ballgame, in my humble opinion, but I like it.

I got some pictures, and so did Mi Sun... I'll be posting them later this week, so look for a link soon.

In school, the class sandwich project was a big hit! All the kids had a ham sandwich (well, half of one, actually) and some chips. I let them all taste the yellow mustard -- I think only a couple of them had ever had it before. It was about half and half, love and hate. Some of them loved it and so I showed them that they could put it on the potato chips also. Used to be one of my favorite snacks, ruffles with mustard. Yum. The other half got this awful kitty-killing look on their face and sputtered around saying something about how godawful it was and wondering what the hell they were thinking. I mean, I guess. It was in Korean, after all. People rarely sputter in their second language, it turns out.

Then I made a couple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which was entirely new for them. I cut them into quarters and let them have at it. Most of them liked it... poor Flounder really hated the jelly, and a couple of them absolutely weren't into the peanut butter... but I was proud that they all wanted to try it. I was just picturing getting American 5th graders to eat the school lunches that we get every day -- now that would be some funny shit. Oh, and the best -- Mi Jin, one of the teachers at the Global Center, made herself a ham, cheese, pickle, mustard and grape jelly sandwich. And ate it. All. I tried it... it was exactly as delicious as it sounds... mot-upseoyo.

And friday night I made cheeseburgers for Mi Sun and Mi Jin. They turned out absolutely amazing. I mean, burgers are easy, I know, but I was (inordinately) proud of myself nonetheless. I finely chopped some onions and mixed them with garlic, salt, pepper, and just a bit of American spicy barbecue sauce I'd gotten from the Army base into the meat and threw them on the skillet. I also fried potatoes (cut the long way, so they resembled french fries) and tossed some salt on there and served them with a ketchup/tabasco mix I threw together. On the burgers -- cheese of course, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, mustard and ketchup (and mayo, for Mi Sun. I tried to talk her out of it, to no avail). They were fan-flippin-tastic. Oh, and I bought some Budweiser from the corner store to complete the American-ness of the meal. I rocked the shit, I must say.

You wanna hear something evil? Of course you do! A new pizza place opened up in town not too long ago. Carry-out only, which blows. But a large pepperoni pizza is only 5oooWon. Which is like, less than $4. And lest you think this is some hot cardboardy garbage-circle pizza, a la Little Caesars... I mean, damn... these things are good. 100% real mozzarella, the best pepperoni I've had in Korea, and this kinda thin, firm yet chewy almost New York style crust... wowzers. And the hot chicken pizza... spicy barbecuey goodness, in a box. So anyway, that's evil. And it's about 100 feet from the bus stop, on my way home, to boot. Bastards. So, long story short, I've been kicking it up a notch at the gym to account for what will soon be a ludicrous level of pizza consumption. I'm now lifting for an hour a day and then playing squash (yeah, I didn't really know what it was either -- here ya go) with this girl who works in the school office after. I'm pretty much hoping to break even, what with the afore-mentioned pizza fiasco.

And now I'm going to study some Korean. I'm still sexy ya'll!