Temple and Soccer game

These are some of the buildings at the Religious retreat where we stayed the night. They have great facilities, and it is about as secluded an area you can find in Seoul.
Fans with flares, last game only one fan had a flare, this game I bet more than 15 people were waving lit flares around after Korea scored its first goal.

Korea stretching during warmups.
Outside view of the stadium.

I had to wait about 10 mins before the wind finally blew the flag open, but that's OK because Christina got sidetracked in the dressing room, and I was waiting outside for her for about an hour (Seriously, no exageration)

Since I had so much time I tried my hand at several different photo styles.

Some came out pretty good, these ones were probably the best.

We have now watched our first international soccer game. We went to the temple on Saturday, and afterwards we watched Korea play Australia in Seoul’s World Cup Stadium.
The temple was great; we got to do a lot of baptisms. We could have done a session, but because we were just at the temple a week ago, we opted to do baptisms. Another reason for doing baptisms was that if I would have left, they would not have had enough priesthood holders to even do baptisms and there were some un-endowed people there that would not have been able to do anything while we were in the session.
After the temple, we went to the stadium to buy our tickets; they cost 10,000won, or about $8.75. When we got our tickets at 2pm, several sections of the stadium were already sold out, so we were expecting a big crowd. After buying the tickets, our plan was to go to Yongsan army base, eat, check into our place of lodging, do some sightseeing, and then head back to the stadium around 5pm.
Through the Gunsan Chaplain we were able to get a free place to stay, they asked for a donation of $20, which is pretty cheap compared to what we would have had to pay elsewhere. The place was great, right up on a mountain, and really secluded, especially when you take into account that we were pretty much in the middle of a city of 14 million people.
We didn’t quite follow our plan, alright we didn’t follow our plan at all. What with getting lost and battling traffic (I swear, every one of Seoul’s 14 million people owns a car, and was driving it on the same street we were on) we finally got checked into our “hotel” at 5pm. We just went straight to the stadium after that. It only took about 20 minutes on the subway. After our last experience with the subway, we were pretty much experts and we showed everyone else what to do.
We got to the stadium early, we staked out our seats and we waited for the crowd to show up, and we waited, and we waited, and then the game started. The stadium never filled up, it was maybe half full. Despite that, it was deafening in there when Korea scored a goal. They won 3-1.
After the game we tried to do some shopping, but by the time we got to a shopping area, everyone was closing down, which actually worked out to our advantage. We got some soccer jerseys for 8,000won. Our friend Jeremy paid 40,000 for his a couple weeks ago, and the ones we got were just as nice. When they guy told us they price, we thought he was kidding because it was so low, but then he told us it was a “closing special.” I guess in Korea, it is considered good luck to sell to your first customer of the day, and to your last customer of they day. As soon as we walked out, he closed up shop.
Our room was great, we had AC, and everything else, and we even got to watch part of College Gameday before we went to bed. We just woke up and left at 8am. We didn’t have to be back until 2:30pm, but our Branch President wanted to leave early. It ended up being a good thing because we got lost on our way out of the city and didn’t actually get out of Seoul until about 9:30am. We had a map, but we decided it made things worse for us. On the map we would see that two roads crossed each other and figure that where they crossed, we could just get onto the other road. That ended up being the case only one time, all of the other times we would come to what we thought was going to be a crossroads only to discover that the road we were on either went over or under the road we wanted to get on. It was very frustrating, but we eventually made it home. It was a great trip, and we are already making plans for our next trip.