Underground Patriots and Two Koreas

I haven't been paying much attention to the East Asian Game despite the fact that Hong Kong is the host city and some of the highest profile games are actually held at the sports field in my boonies. You blame me? There's a general lack of coordination by the present HK government. Anyway, I found out on Friday that South Korea would play DPR Korea in the bronze medal match on Saturday and I got tickets to take Grandpa and Grandma to the game.

We spent the morning at the HK Dog Rescue (this is another story and the ending is to be unfold later today. Right now, I'm writing this one at a supposed to be serene coffee shop that is in disarray because of a kiddie birthday party). We rushed to the stadium in the end because we spent too much time thinking if we should foster a pretty sick puppy. The stadium wasn't full and we managed to get a pretty good seat. Not sure if it's because of the teams (people in HK care more about shopping in Myung Dong than anything else in Korea) or it's a lack of advertisement. Regardless of what the Dear Leader from the North does to freak people out, it was quite nice to see the players understood sportsmanship. They helped each other to get up. Each side tried hard at the game but there was no cursing or throwing things around. (check out videos of the PRC football team on YouTube if you want to see more barbaric moves). In the shoot out, the Southerners won but the Northerners were graceful.

Since the tickets were full day tickets and we got pretty good seat, we stayed on for the gold medal match. It was HK vs Japan. Frankly, I don't know anything about either team but I found it quite appalling that people around us kept booing at the Japanese team even when it's the Japanese goalie trying to kick the ball after HK's fail attempt at scoring.

We left half time and when I read about HK's victory, I didn't feel proud. The booing, the annoyance the audience created for the Japanese team was a total lack of sportsmanship.

What really frightened me was to see all these underground patriots. When was the last time they stood up to push the government to do the right thing? Shouldn't that passion be channeled into something that does more for the people or we are all regressing to cavemen?