Seoul Living: Waiting all year to beg for free stuff

What are all these kids in blue doing? Begging for free food!

Apparently, it's a tradition during the Ko-Yon Games, when Yonsei University and Korea University - two private universities in Seoul - compete in a bunch of athletic contest to test their famous rivalry. This year, KU apparently won most of the matches (which are in baseball and soccer, amongst a few other sports), but no one seemed to care. On Saturday night, gangs of students in Yonsei blue and KU crimson took to the streets, parking themselves in front of restaurants and bars, singing and chanting for food, booze, anything free. I gotta say, I heard some pretty impressive chants (along with coordinated dances). I hope those kids got something out of it.

But begging for free stuff only once out of the year? Come on, that's what everyday American college life is about!!!

What's actually even cooler was that, despite the (thousands of?) students in the streets, it was so very friendly between the two schools. No fights! No riots, sir! My friend, Pat, was in the Notre Dame marching band and once mentioned to me that Michigan fans used to throw broken beer bottles at them. None of this here. The Yonsei-KU rivalry is big, but it was neat to see that all the students were just really having a good time, both amongst their own schoolmates and the others'. We gotta get more non-violent happy energy (over the violent type!) going back in the US and Europe!


It seemed that most of the student gangs were really groups of kids from the same academic department. This was delightfully nerdy at times, as evidenced by this awesome varsity jacket. I love it...and am reminded of my varsity band jacket that I proudly wore in high school.

Uh, did I really just admit that?

Lest I make the Koreans seem too stereotypically, well, Asian (in the American definition of the stereoptype), the night of the "Let's beg for free food" gangs was also the same night as Seoul's Cyon B-Boy Competition in my neighborhood (Cyon is a Korean phone brand by LG Electronics) . Korean hip hop culture! Who woulda thunk it? More surprising, however, is how cool Korean hip hop (specifically, b-boy) culture is. Really, it's not the "Oh my gosh, these guys are so lame" attempts to replicate hip hop. The only slightly lame part was when the Cyon executive came out to present the 1st place prize. A suit amongst a bunch of b-boys. Amusing.

Korean b-boys are apparently some of the best in the world...I guess they are skinnier so they, er, spin faster? Anyways, the competition was really entertaining. You know, for all the people taking videos at the event, there wasn't one video that I could find online! This is the closest I could get, and these guys weren't even as half as good as the actual competition finalists! Still, it's an entertaining bit about Korean life that you probably didn't know about before.

The more you know...