배드민턴 FTW

In class, I get to ask kids about their favorites of a lot of things. Favorite food, favorite TV show (which will come up in another post later), favorite music, favorite sport. They all love badminton (배드민턴 over here, which is just the Koreanized English word "baeduminton").

"I can play badminton," I said to myself. "We play that every year at Christian's July 4 party." And since there's no frisbee golf here, I needed a sport to take its place as a simple, free-once-you-buy-the-equipment activity. So I e-mailed Sun-A and Greg, and we all went to Yongji Park.

Now from what I understand, badminton here is like basketball in the U.S. Everyone knows it, has seen it, maybe played it once or twice, but not EVERYONE plays. So Sun-A isn't a hardcore player. And when we got to the badminton court, there were people there, but it wasn't packed. And there's only one court.

The actual court was occupied by about 10 Korean kids who looked to be about 14 years old. While they played, Greg and I swatted the shuttlecock back and forth in an open space next to the court. The activity gave us a chance to practice Korean numbers while we kept score.

Then Sun-A asked if we'd like to play with the kids. "Sure," we decided. It could be pretty hilarious. Greg and I took the court against two of them expecting to get killed. But we destroyed them pretty easily. Then to even things out, we let their other friends play, too. We switched off among the three of us -- two playing, one sitting out -- against four Korean kids. It was a riot. We didn't keep score, just kept hitting it back and forth until the KIDS begged US to take a break. That's right. I wore out Korean teenagers.

I love 배드민턴.