I recounted, in post-6, how I “used to” play soccer every Saturday, from late-2011 through mid-2012 in the Bupyeong neighborhood of the Seoul Megalopolis. The games stopped happening, as people stopped showing up. I’m happy to say that a game finally happened on June 8th and I was there.
I walked to the field, as is my habit, leaving my home about 11:30 AM. I bought two 2-liter bottled waters on the way. The weather is warm enough and the sun strong enough that I was sweating by the time I showed up at 12:15 to find three others waiting. By 12:30, 13 players had showed up, of whom four were American (me and three others), one Canadian (D., who started playing about the same time I did in 2011), and the rest, British or Irish. Most of the faces were totally new to me. All the initial players were White and English teachers, mostly from Incheon. One Korean I’d never seen before showed up late. The games were always English-teacher-oriented, but in the past there were several regular Korean players, and even a handful of miscellaneous players whose “stories” I never learned, like the 21-year-old Russian who said he worked for some company, and who spoke fluent Korean but mediocre English.
I am not in bad shape, I found, but I definitely got tired a lot more quickly than I did playing in 2012. I scored a goal.