Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

One of the best parts of slow travel is that when you get lost it’s not a big deal.  You can just roll with it and keep exploring instead of needing to double back to make sure you don’t miss something important.  Sunday afternoon we decided that we would like to visit Ulsan Grand Park.  We got on the bus and made our way across town not really knowing where to get off.  We passed our stop but just kept going and ended up at the Munsu Sports Complex.  No big deal.  The International Archery Championships were still going on and I didn’t make it with Brynn and the girls earlier in the week.  So, we went to see some more archery.

After enough archery to satisfy us we headed back to the rest of the complex on our private tour bus.  We were the only people looking to leave the action filled archery event I guess.  We wandered around through the park area with the Rainbow Valley style pond with whale and swan paddle boats.  Then we stopped to grab a bite to eat and continued on to the Ulsan Munsu Football Stadium.  This stadium was build in 2002 when Korea and Japan shared hosting the World Cup Soccer tournament.  The stadium is very impressive.  Earlier in the day we had inquired about seeing a game and found out that we would be able to come back in the evening to see the Ulsan Hyundai Tigers.

Being rich and all we walked up to the ticket booth and told them we wanted to buy the best seats they had.  We got our pair of tickets in the Gold VIP section, just outside the corporate boxes.  We entered the stadium through the main doors instead of through the outer gates.  Inside our doors was a museum of sorts to celebrate the World Cup from 2002.  Of course we paid cash for our tickets as well – 20,000 won total.  ($17.45 CDN)  The place was massive and the few thousand fans were dwarfed by the size of the stadium.  It felt like we had our own private section, our tickets weren’t numbered in the gold section so we chose our own seats.  The game was entertaining and we had a lot of fun.  The half time show included a dance show and a fireworks show.

You never know what you’ll stumble upon in Korea.  We had no idea when we left our apartment that we would end up watching a professional Korean soccer game in a World Cup stadium.  The odd thing about the locals is that they don’t take advantage of the parks that are available to them until the sun is about to set.  We can walk around all day and be basically alone because Korean people seem to be afraid of the sun.  It’s great for us but seems to be a shame that they are missing out on so much of the day.  When Brynn asks at school most of her kids say they prefer to play video games all weekend anyway.