Thursday, September 18th 9:30 PM
Sauntering down the street in Incheon, I hear a raucous noise emanating from across the way. Food and drink. Seafood. Oh, okay. Wait. I’ve walked along here dozens of times. This restaurant has never been like that. On a Thursday? I detoured a few steps to peer in. Wouldn’t you have done the same? Yes; packed. Hmm. A mystery, but not for long: THAILAND. On one jacket; and another; on all their jackets. Mystery solved. They were athletes and coaches.
Sauntering down the street in Incheon, I hear a raucous noise emanating from across the way. Food and drink. Seafood. Oh, okay. Wait. I’ve walked along here dozens of times. This restaurant has never been like that. On a Thursday? I detoured a few steps to peer in. Wouldn’t you have done the same? Yes; packed. Hmm. A mystery, but not for long: THAILAND. On one jacket; and another; on all their jackets. Mystery solved. They were athletes and coaches.
And so began the “Asian Games” for me (I’d never heard of them, either; a kind of Asia-only Olympics) and are being held in Incheon, South Korea, the very city I am in as I write these words.
It is, actually, exciting to have 10,000 athletes from across Asia show up along with a substantial number of fans and hangers-on. Suddenly Incheon feels multicultural. There seems to be a rule that athletes must wear their team jackets anywhere they go. I was able to thus identify others on Friday night, and more on Sunday. Two with BANGLADESH emblazoned on their jackets were trying to finagle a taxi driver into going where they want to go,
It is, actually, exciting to have 10,000 athletes from across Asia show up along with a substantial number of fans and hangers-on. Suddenly Incheon feels multicultural. There seems to be a rule that athletes must wear their team jackets anywhere they go. I was able to thus identify others on Friday night, and more on Sunday. Two with BANGLADESH emblazoned on their jackets were trying to finagle a taxi driver into going where they want to go,
The tickets are very cheap, at under $10 for most events, so I hope I can go to one or more. Interestingly, one of the sports at the Asian Games is baseball. One I was thinking about seeing — this is not a joke — was Pakistan versus Hong Kong. Yes, they have fielded baseball teams. China has also fielded a baseball team. These kinds of teams will all be clobbered by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Other big news is that the North Korean delegation is here and is competing. Oh, and today I learned that Palestine has an official team (even without an official country) while Israel has been banned from the Games for decades.