We will to victory! Korea Fighting.

Korea is bound and determined to change me into a football (oops! soccer) fan.

After watching my brother and sister play soccer for upward of 12 years, you’d think I’d have gained some sort of attachment to the sport. However, I have proven entirely immune to the draw of soccer and have avoided most games and certainly never gone out of my way to watch any kind of soccer match. If I am going to a game it is probably because I am being dragged there, and if someone is trying to get me to watch it on TV, it’s simply a lost cause.

Until now.

As I’m sure all of you are aware, the World Cup has been going on for the last two weeks or so and, out of the blue, I have become a hard core soccer fan. I dress in my team’s colors, know all the chants and dance moves, scream when we score and generally make an obnoxious prick out of myself wherever I am watching the game.

The catch- I am supporting Korea. Well, I was, though we lost last night, so I imagine I will revert back to my normal, sports oblivious self very soon.

I still don’t actually care much for the game. I mean, it looks pretty fun to play, and I’m sure it’s great to watch if you’re into that kind of thing, but I’m really just in it for the mob mentality. Because when Korea gets patriotic, they get PATRIOTIC. They don’t do national pride halfheartedly here. This means that on game day, about 75% of the country is wearing red shirts that say things like “Korean victory- Begin to 2010”, “We will to victory”, “The shouts of the reds, United Korea” or my personal favorite “Korea fighting”. Every single one of my elementary students wrote about Korea’s first game in their journals, and I expect this week that they will write devastatingly depressing entries about the loss to Uruguay that sent us out of the running. Park Jisung (Korea’s star player) is a national hero and all of the boys I teach are eager to become him. My Korean coworkers have taken to chanting the national chant to their kindergarteners to instill them with the appropriate Korean pride. The chant, by the way, goes something like this:

Dae Han Minguk! [clapclap, clapclap, clap] (repeat as many times as interest remains)(Dae Han Minguk means Republic of Korea)

If one chants this on a game day to any passing Korean, they have about a 95% chance of getting a reply in kind. If one simply shouts it out on the street that chance will increase to 100%.

And so, for the first game against Greece, I found myself decked out in a “Shouts of the Reds” shirt and a “Begin to 2010” bandana, hiding from the rain and watching the game in a Korean BBQ restaurant. That meal was interspersed with restaurant-wide Dae Han Minguk chants, a few national pride songs and a lot of shouting at the screen. Later that night, I found myself in a pub half filled with Americans and half filled with Brits to watch the England-US game, but I found that less exciting than constantly cheering in Korean. (though still entertaining; Americans are bloody obnoxious and the Brits are excessively calm)

My next game was the most exciting, though also the most depressing to watch. I schlepped myself over to Hongik University on a weeknight to watch Argentina destroy South Korea. So I found myself surrounded by thousands of Korean university students wearing red devil shirts, blinking red devil horns and Korean flags. We clapped, we chanted, we sang, we jumped, we danced and I lost my voice and couldn’t talk at work the next day.

And I’ve just watched my final game, hanging out in the rain outside a convenience store on an island. I mean, that shows dedication, doesn’t it? I could have been in my nice little beach hut, but instead I came out to cheer for my team.

Apparently it took coming to another country for me to realize how much the rest of the world likes soccer, but oh, they do. We definitely just don’t get it in America and I recommend hanging out in a foreign country during the next World Cup. They know how to watch their soccer.

So, we may not have to victoried this year, but begin to 2014, we will to victory. Dae Han Minguk!