5 Is The Magic Number

I'm feeling pretty good right now after a long day of playing ultimate in Seoul and hanging out with Miso. There's an ultimate tournament happening at the end of June in Shanghai, and it looks like I'll be able to get one a team going over there. It's quite competitive, so I've been busing or training up the past few weekends to play.

I took the dog this time, which meant he and I spent 8-9 hours on buses, subways and trains as we shuttled from Mokpo to Seoul to the fields and back. Quite a heavy trip for the both of us, but it was not without its nuggets of entertainment. My favourite was on the subway, when an ajosshi encouraged the two of us to sit down next to him. He spoke English, and it was a 30 minute ride, so I sat down and we started talking.

He was sober, which was wonderful, but still nuts as could be. Or at more likely, he had once been quite an intelligent guy, but things seemed to have been sliding on him the past decade or two. He spent the majority of our ride together discussing the significance of the number 5. I guess he saw something about the Olympics, and he thought of the rings, which lead to the many other universal links of the number 5.

"5 rings, 5 fingers."

'5 vital organs: heart, lungs, liver, stomach and kidneys."

"5 parts of the face." He never explained those.

"5 colours of hair." What?

"5 colours of skin. Yours is white. I am yellow. Africans are black. Russians are... uh, Russians are red. And Australians, Australians... uh... 5 colours of skin, you see!"

There were also 5 ways of speaking, 5 shapes of the mouth, etc. etc.. It was the deepest conversation I've had with a stranger in quite some time.

"My Dog The Racist"

Yep, Miso is a racist. He knows a Korean when he sees them, and he does not like them. Even our Korean friends who hang out with us get the same treatment from him: Barking, snarling and running away. Foreigners only need to s much as look at him and he's in love with them, and will cry 5 minutes after meeting them if they leave him. But Koreans, my goodness does he get his "hate" on when they come around. He still fears children, though I had we had a great encounter with a foreigner today that leads me to believe it may again be just Korean children. I think maybe I need to train him a little better with Koreans and children, or perhaps it's time to start trying to train the people he meets on how to make friends with him.