Recently I’ve been feeling like I don’t get out in Seoul enough and that I’m not taking advantage of what a huge city has to offer. I will frequently make plans to go out and sight see, but then seem not to have the energy or drive to put the time and effort in. So when the news that Brazil was coming to play Korea in a friendly and all of the Brazilian stars were coming I figured that had to be enough motivation and if it wasn’t I needed to get help.

Thankfully Bitna and Mark were on their game and went out and got awesome tickets for us. They also made sure that we got going early enough to fight the massive amounts of people trying to get to the stadium via subway. I had yet to see a line in Seoul for a subway that extended across the platform and up the stairs. We definitely had to do a little bit of pushing and squeezing to get ourselves on the train. Thankfully I did not get the wrath of an ajima for pushing and compacting myself on to the train. 

The tickets we had were on the bottom level allowing us to see the majority of the action as Brazil was attacking on our end of the field the first half. The game turned out to be fairly good as far as friendlies go. The Korean team seemed to be playing very physical on Neymar and frustrating him, not sure if this was intentional or because they couldn’t keep up with him. It led to a couple of yellow cards and a bit of an argument between the two teams at half.

Watching Neymar play was definitely the highlight, his moves and his overall quickness are amazing. I was not alone in this as the whole Korean fan section of the stadium had moments where there was a collective ooh, ooooh, followed by an awww as he lost the ball. It was very apparently that while they were cheering for Korea they were there to see the Brazilian footwork. I can’t blame them as that was the same reason I had gone.

The excitement level at the game was far higher than any other soccer game I had been to in Korea. The stadium was close to capacity at just over 65,000 people in attendance. The crowd kept it bumping throughout the game with people singing, waving flags, throwing toilet paper. The mood seemed to stay happy the whole way through even though the Korean side lost 2-0. The only complaining I heard was from a few guys behind us who were Korean but from Mallorca, Spain, but even theres seemed more in jest than anything else. It definitely made me do a double take as I kept hearing them yelling at Marcelo things like “asesino, abusador” I couldn’t help but chuckle because it seemed so out of place and showed the difference of type of intensity at soccer matches between Latin America and Korea.