Today, we have men's curling at 9 AM so this means a really early start. We wake up around 6:30 AM and leave the house by 7:15 AM. But not before Beth gives me a Valentine's Day card. Who remembers to buy a card more than 2 weeks ahead of time and bring it with her on our trip? My wife does! Feeling for perhaps the millionth time that I don't deserve this woman, we head out the door for the long walk to Gangneung Olympic Park. But today we are lucky and a bus arrives at "our" bus stop just as we are crossing the street.
The Winter Olympics have always been contested in early February so Valentine's Day always overlaps with it. To celebrate I've put two or three Valentine's Day Olympic pins on my vest in the hopes of stimulating some trades. But do they even celebrate Valentine's Day in Korea? I don't know.
Because of the 30+ minutes we saved by catching the bus, we arrive at the venue well before the start of the match. I spend a few moments giving pins to volunteers then we head inside. The venue is in great shape:
We understand from Sunny's older daughter Minji that she learned how to ice skate and speed skate in this building, but it underwent extensive remodeling to turn it into a curling arena. It is also the only Olympic venue in Gangneung that existed prior to PyeongChang being awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics seven years ago.
As you can see from this picture, we've got a great view of one end of the four ice sheets. Sweden is going to play Denmark on Sheet A (closest to us). Canada is playing Italy on Sheet B. The US is playing Korea on Sheet C and Great Britain is playing Switzerland on Sheet D (farthest from us). The section next to us is made up of what looks like a local school group:
Usually, the teams march into the arena behind a bagpiper (because the Scots invented curling). But pipers must be in short supply in Korea because the teams come in to a recording of bagpipes playing along with a group of sign carriers dressed like soldiers during the Joseon Dynasty:
This is the first curling session at these games so we don't have any expectations about what will happen, except that Great Britain and Canada are traditionally strong every year and Korea has almost no curling history and qualified only because they are the host nation.
Just a quick tutorial for those of you who have never watched curling. Each of the four players gets to slide (throw) two 20 kg (40 lb) stones during each end (like an inning in baseball). This means that team has eight stones per end, for a total of 16. The skips (captains) decide where each team member should aim their stones:
He does this by taking his broom and putting it on the ice like the Canadian skip in this picture. The player throwing the stone starts by pushing off from a foot rest called the hack and slides toward the target. He must release the stone before reaching the red hogline located 33 feet from the hack. There are a pair of sweepers walking along next to the stone to sweep the ice in front of it:
Once the stone is in motion, the skip and the thrower instruct the sweepers on whether to leave the stone alone or sweep it. The ice surface is covered with a layer of small bumps called pebbles that keep the stone from making complete contact with the ice surface. Sweeping removes some of these pebbles allowing the curlers to speed up as well as change the direction of the stone:
The scoring area is called the house and is composed of four concentric circles at 1, 4, 8 and 12 feet from the center. The stone closest to the center after all stones have been thrown scores one point. If the next nearest stone belongs to the same team, then that stone also counts. This continues until the first stone for the other team is reached. For example:
in this picture, the US team (yellow stones) have two stones touching the 1 foot circle (called the button). If the current positions stayed through all 16 stones, then the US would score 2 points because they have two stones closer than the first Korean stone.
Once an end is completed, the curlers turn around and throw to the opposite house. Play continues through 10 ends, but goes into extra ends if the score is tied. Halfway through, the scores are Sweden 5, Denmark 2; Canada 1, Italy 1; US 8, Korea 3 and Great Britain 2, Switzerland 1. We have discovered that the Korean fans know nothing about curling because they will cheer wildly whenever the Koreans throw a stone closest to the center. But curling is less like archery and more like chess so when the Koreans throw a stone onto the button, the US will just knock it out of the way and make sure that their stone ends up in an advantageous position. We also discovered that the Korean fans have no interest in any of the matches except for the one that their team is playing. This is too bad because the other matches were more interesting than that one.
For example, the Italians rightly fear the Canadian's reputation so they are playing a highly defensive game with very few stones in play. To some degree, the strategy worked because Canada only won 5-3, but the outcome never felt like it was in doubt. The Swedes and Danes had been playing the same sort of defensive game until the Swedes scored 3 in the 5th end. This forced Denmark to play a more complex game with lots of guards (stones in front of the house that make it more difficult to hit particular stones in the house). Unfortunately, this change did not benefit Denmark and Sweden ended up winning 9-5. The US and Korea played a very offensive game where the team with the last stone (called the hammer) scored at least 1 point (and often 2 or 3) in every end. But the best match was between Great Britain (whose team is exclusively from Scotland) and Switzerland. This match had lots of stones in play, but through excellent shot making neither side was able to build much of an advantage. Switzerland had the hammer in the 10th end and managed to score one point to tie the score at 5-5, but Great Britain came back in the first extra end to score one to win 6-5.
The curling arena was at the far end of the Olympic park well away from all of the other stadia as well as the stores and sponsor pavilions, so I was surprised that this is where Coke decided to locate their pin trading center. Since it was close to curling, I dropped by to get some pins (they weren't selling any!!) and see how things were going. Coke allowed pin traders to reserve table space at specific times so that anyone coming in to this pretty small space generally had to trade with the 3-4 traders who had reserved time. One of the people was a guy from southern California that I've known for a long time so I am able to trade three media pins that I'd picked up for 2 NOC (national Olympic committee) pins from Ghana (who has one skeleton athlete) and 1 NOC pin from Nigeria (which has 1 skeleton athlete and 2 women in women's bobsleigh) - good deal! But overall, there are only a couple Koreans inside, mostly looking to see what this pin thing is all about. This is fairly typical as it takes the hosts about a week to really get into pins. Unfortunately, I'll be back in California when that happens.
It is now early afternoon and we are getting hungry so we head to the big spectator food tent across from the Olympic superstore. This area is huge - nearly the size of a football field. Inside is mostly tables to eat at. Unlike the concession stands in the venues, this one is laid out more like the place in the Seoul market where we ate - you order in one place and then pick up your food at one or more of the food preparation areas in the back of the tent. We find a place to sit and I watch our stuff while Beth waits for our food to come out. While I'm waiting, a guy who also has pins all over his vest comes over and wants to trade. The first one he wanted was one of the Valentine's Day pins - success! He trades for a couple more and I get some sponsor pins with sports on them - pins I know that I'll either be able to trade now or future Olympics. One of the pins is a Visa pin. When I chose that one, a woman who was sitting next to us says that she's glad that I chose the Visa pin because that is who she works for. She apologizes for not having any pins and asks what our favorite Olympics have been. I give her the same answer that I give everyone that asks. My favorite is the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. I like these Games the best, despite the -40 C (-40 F) temperatures because there will never be another Olympics where you drop 200,000 people into a town of 10-15,000 inhabitants and because the Norwegian fans were so great. While they rooted hard for their own team, they were appreciative of any good performance. She mentions that this week she's been meeting with the members of the Beijing 2022 observation team to work out how the Visa sponsorship will go in 2022. She says that most of the members of the Beijing 2022 team appear to have also been involved with the 2008 Beijing Olympics. This apparently causes Visa some trouble because it means that the instead of just doing what Visa wants, they already have preconceived ideas of what they want from Visa.
Beth comes back with the food just as this trade wraps up. I enjoyed my bulgogi and rice yesterday at the food court so order that again - it is one of the few Korean foods that is not spicy! Beth has something called Korean Festival noodles which is fine rice noodles and a bunch of veggies in a mildly spicy broth. Eating good food in a warm place - what a concept!
We just about finished our food when another pin trader comes over and wants to trade. She doesn't have much from current Olympics, but I take a skeleton pin and a figure skating pin from Vancouver. I'm really not interested in acquiring more old pins (a few thousand is enough), but fortunately she only wants some pins I've got duplicates of. About this time, we notice that the wind has really picked up and is blowing the tent (including the metal frame) around a lot. We drop our trays at the designated location and head over to the Olympic superstore to pick up a couple of hoodies.
It takes a while for us to figure out how Asian sizes correspond to American sizes (L in America is XL in Asia), but we figure it out and find hoodies for Sean and I. I walk over to the pin area to see if there are any new ones. While I'm there, there are a couple tremendous wind gusts and the whole metal frame of the superstore tent is blowing back and forth. It makes so much noise that everyone in the area moves away from that part of the tent. There is an announcement in Korean. We don't know what is going on, but we go to the checkout line and go back outside. When we get there, we find that they are no longer letting customers into the superstore. Apparently the announcement was to have everyone complete their purchases and leave the building until someone can determine whether the building is still safe.
Outside, the wind is really blowing. Beth needs to make sure to keep both feet on the ground for fear of being blown over. Workers are rushing to take down signs:
before they are blown away. We also see a lot of metal fencing used for crowd control that has either been blown over or laid down. We estimate the gusts at 50-60 mph.
We cautiously make our way back to the train station and catch a taxi home. When I check my email, I find that we've received a message from Sunny. We've been trying to find a time to take her family out for dinner since our schedule later in the week is difficult. Her message says that tonight will work out for dinner, but we will have to wait until around 8 PM because she has to pick her younger daughter up at the train station. This is okay with us. We have a snack and I take out my computer and start working on my blog.
Around 7 PM, Sunny's husband and elder daughter arrive home with what is obviously the younger daughter Minju. Her English is really good with very little accent. Sunny had told us that she spent a year in Canada learning about alternative education and took her then 8 year old daughter with her so she learned English by immersion similarly to how Sean learned Mandarin. Now she attends a special high school in Seoul where she is learning traditional Korean folk singing and dancing. She is home to celebrate the new lunar year with her family. She is curious about all of my pins so I explain to her that pins are the sport of the spectator and a way of meeting new people. She's thrilled when I give her one.
Sunny finally gets back from the cafe and asks us whether we prefer restaurants where we sit in chairs or ones where we sit on the floor. I think that she was worried we wouldn't want to sit on the floor so she is relieved to hear that we have done this before. I'm worried about fitting six people in her car, but she says that we can walk to this restaurant.
When we arrive, we are seated at two tables side-by-side, both with cooking surfaces:
Sunny (whose name is really Hyunsun) is on the left. Her younger daughter Minju is next to her and her older daughter Minji is at the end. Sunny's husband Jaeyoung is behind Beth. On the tables, you can see pork bellies, sausage, kimchi, mushrooms and a few unidentifiable things on the cooking surface and piles of lettuce, a soup of some sort and bowls of onions on the sides. This style of food is called ssambap (ssam is wrapper, bap is rice) and the basic idea is to put rice and other items in a lettuce leaf and eat the whole thing in one bite. You can spice your bite up by adding some gochujang (red pepper paste), but I preferred daenjang - a soybean paste. I never really got the hang of wrapping the food in the lettuce and ended up eating it like a flimsy green taco, but did manage not to end up wearing any of it. To drink, we started out with sikhye, a sweet rice drink (non-alcoholic). This was pretty good. Later we tried one of Sunny's favorites; beer mixed with one shot of soju - a clear liquor similar to vodka fermented from rice. This is somewhat like a boilermaker except that you are supposed to bang the inside bottom of your glass to release the bubbles instead of dropping the shot glass into the beer glass. The owner said that he liked the harmony of our table so much that he gave us free bottles of sikhye to take home with us. This was a great evening!
Steps for the day: 11,628
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