Week 70 – Basketball, farming, and horse racing

Clearly the best work detail

Still on extended work schedule, but our Saturday was a volunteer event and I was able to get out Friday night to play basketball and Sunday to the horse races.

Basketball

I joined a team through a meetup group – first 8 to sign up show up to play a game. Good format, first 15 minutes is pickup to get warmed up and figure out your teammates and then two 20 minute halves with a running clock, a ref, and scoreboard. No limit on fouls and they call very closely – enabled me to get a triple-double if you count turnovers too. We lost a close game but they had uniforms, so it wasn’t too bad. In the game following ours, one team brought cheerleaders.

Farming Work Session in DMZ

Our Saturday work session was to help farmers in the civilian control zone (the most northern 1 KM of South Korea that boarders the DMZ) who have a hard time finding help because of restrictions getting into that zone. I was asked since I was from Oklahoma that I must be experienced in agricultural matters – I said it was limited to a week a summer at grandparents and I learned it was way too hard of work for me. Luckily we had a task where I could swing a sickle and hit something. At lunch, I sat next to several co-workers who were stationed near where we were working and they explained how the tank blockade worked.

We were separated into work details, everyone was excited about getting to ride in the back of a pickup. The Koreans said when they were kids, they rode in back of pickup trucks all the time – pretty similar to U.S. experience.

***Our task was cleaning out old beanstalks from greenhouses***

***This thing was awesome…sliced right through the stalks***

**Tank blockade – the “plan” is that the explosives planted in the small legs are detonated and then the column falls into the road. But since they were built in the late 1950’s the** explosives may not be too reliable, so my co-workers who were stationed in the DMZ shared that they were instructed to run from the tanks, throw grenades under the small legs, and wait to see what happened.

***Checkpoint at DMZ – 3 KM from here to North Korea border***

Horse Racing

Very nice track and a huge family event – the infield is filled with playgrounds, water fountains kids can play in, pony rides, and food stands (similar to the Preakness). All for $2. Went with mostly expats from the U.K. and there was probably 6 kids under 5 in our group. We figured how it was all funded – pretty much impossible to win at horse betting, we figured out a system and picked 3 winners in a row and won maybe $2-3 dollars for every $5 bet. And of course over the day we had more losers than winners.