Inglorious Expats in Busan

Le Squad

As our time in Korea winds down (two weeks left!), we’ve been trying to settle accounts. There isn’t much left to do. Of course, it’s an entire country and you could spend 40 years exploring and not see all of it, but we’ve done everything we set out to do.

We’d been hoping to get down to Busan (the 2^nd largest city in the country, located on the southern tip of the peninsula) for a good long while, and finally found a reason by way of an ultimate Frisbee tournament held on one of the beaches.

What a weekend.

The tournament was 5 v. 5, single gender, so the first hoop to jump was putting together a team, which turned out to be a wild process. The initial team was made up of the guys from my office (Daniel and Zhenya), and some other guys I’ve met here and there.

We settled on calling ourselves the Inglorious Expats – credit to Z.

We put together a squad of eight only to watch it fall apart a few days before the tournament. Daniel had a fever of 102, other guys had financial issues; you know how it goes.

So Zhenya and I found ourselves the only guys on the team not long before we were slated to get on a bus to Busan – our tickets already bought and paid for. I contacted the tournament director and told her we’d have to drop, which was a bummer. The weekend was shaping up to be a bust, and that would have made about three trips that had fallen apart on us in the past month.

This was, however, when things started to turn around.

Madeline, the director, put out feelers. In the time it took me to read Henry and Mudge with 12 kindergarteners, she has found six guys to join our team. By the time I got home that night, she had us rounded out to a full roster of ten.

So we were back in business, and celebrated by making sweet tie-dye jerseys (see above).

I guess it wouldn’t have been an expat team in Korea if you knew any more than one other person on the team before the tournament. That’s been the way of it here all along. Getting thrown in with a bunch of cool strangers, and coming out with some new friends and a good time.

The new guys came from all over the place. Some of them were teachers in the Busan or Seoul area. Others were just passing through the country for work or travel. Some of them were more experienced Frisbee players than others. One of the guys actually plays for the Korean national team, so that’s something.

Everybody, though, was out to have a good time, and worked their butt off. And we did well!

There were 12 men’s teams, almost all of which were squads that play together regularly in the Korean league. We played seven games on the beach, and finished 3-4, which landed us 6^th place out of 12. I can live with that.

The fields were set up on Dadaepo beach, which was one the best beaches we’ve seen in Korea hands down (and I’ve heard it’s the least of Busan’s beaches). The sun was out in force, the beach was covered in people throwing Frisbees. The horizon was set in mountains over the water. It was, by far, the most beautiful place I’ve ever played Frisbee – and I’ve played in Milledgeville, GA.

Looking out from Dadaepo beach

This was my first Frisbee tournament, and it was intense.

Z, Clarice, Maria and I caught an 10:30 PM bus from Seoul on Friday after work, and arrived in a deserted bus station in Busan around 4 AM Saturday. Our plan was to crash in a jimjabong (sauna) until around 8 and then make for the beach, but with Daniel (our main navigator/translator) home sick we were caught a little off balance when the cab driver couldn’t find the address to the spa.

The cabbie was a good enough guy though, and we spent a (cheap!) half hour in his car driving around the city looking for (we assumed) a jimjabong. Eventually, the cabbie dropped us off in front of a semi-promising jimjabong near-ish the beach area. It was still dark out, and the sauna was closed, so we regrouped and had an early breakfast at a 24/7 traditional Korean restaurant. There’s a soup with a milky bean broth and thick cut pork that Busan’s famous for, and, lucky for us, that was one of the four things on the menu!

Z, Clarice and the full 5 AM spread. Note the menu in the top left of the picture.

Under normal circumstances, it probably wouldn’t have been my first choice for a meal at 5 AM, but man was it good.

We felt revived after the soup, and the sun was starting to come up, so we just made or the beach.

I guess I was expecting the tournament organizers to be setting up a lot sooner. We were the only people on the beach until 9 AM – and the captain’s meeting was at 9:40. We had a good time with the beach to ourselves, except for Maria and Clarice who didn’t bring sweatshirts.

The whole tournament was pretty ram-jam from then on out. Our first game was at 10 AM, and we still had teammates walking on to the beach at 9:55. There wasn’t time to do much outside of throwing people jerseys and exchanging names before we were out on the field throwing against the 1^st seeded team (they would go on to win the tournament).

Needless to say, between the tough matchup and us having never played together, our first game was a little one sided. Humility aside though, I did complete a hammer-throw touchdown pass to Zhenya that game, which validated the 4 hours we’d spent freezing on the beach that morning.

After that icebreaker of a first game, the team regrouped at our camp, helped ourselves to a few of the dollar beers under the main tent, and then jogged back out into the sun.

We went on to win our next two games, and lost the last game of the day on account of being totally spent. When I played in college, the games were 40/45 minutes with a half-time. The games at the tournament were 50 minutes straight through, no breaks, and on sand. All of the teams spent the first 20 minutes of the tournament walking the fields to remove toe-slicer shells and trash, but even still, we were tore up from the floor up.

I can’t remember having more fun in the past 6 months, though. All the guys on our team were cool dudes (and skilled), and even when we were losing we were laughing.

The whole vibe of the tournament was good-times.

Some guys went out Saturday night, but Z and I were destroyed and Maria and Clarice looked like lobsters, so we opted for Korean BBQ and a full night of sleep.

Sunday we hobbled up to the fields at 9 AM and played three more games, but we were still pretty out of gas and beat up from the previous day’s play. This is where the teams that played together so often in the Korean league started to pull ahead (they were mid-season at this point). By the second game my knee was turning on me, which was pretty alarming as I’ve never had trouble with it before. With the SE Asia trip coming up so soon, I didn’t want to push my luck and sat the last game out – which sucked.

Kudos to all my friends who’ve done things like this before – all day Frisbee or soccer tournaments. It’s killer. That said, when the fatigue set in and people’s bodies started to wear out, everybody just got chiller. By the last game, everyone on the sideline (both teams) was holding a beer and shouting bawdy slurs and encouragement out onto the field. Like I said, it was good vibes from top to bottom.

Everyone was there to play hard and win, but there was none of that hyper-competitive testosteroned-out douchebagery that you sometimes get when you put a bunch of guys on a field.

Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was the Frisbee. Maybe the sun had just fried all of our brains into a stupor. Whatever the reason, we had a blast.

The tournament ended, the Inglorious Expats parted ways, and we caught the 4 PM bus back to Seoul.

Big takeaways: My flick has improved with age, and I’ve got to be the luckiest guy to meet up with so many great people out here.

What a weekend. I felt 100 years old the next day.