Rugby in Gumi

Hear ye, hear ye---Joe finally got to play rugby!! It's been a long time coming. He's been in touch with various expat rugby teams throughout Korea for months now (long before we even arrived here) and today he got to hook up with a group of rugby guys at last. Much to our surprise, there is an expat rugby team in Gumi, but not in Daegu. Hmm. Gumi is 1/5 the size of Daegu. The population is about 500,000, just around the size of Tucson. You'd think there'd be a team in Daegu. Anyhoo, we took the train to Gumi earlier today (takes about 25 minutes to get there) and met up with six other guys at a restaurant called Waegook Cook (which means Foreign Cook...hmmm). Two of the guys were from South Africa, one from the U.S. by way of Costa Rica, one from Ireland, one from New Zealand, and one from Canada. An eclectic group.
We took a cab to the rugby "pitch". And by "pitch" I mean a shortened field of astro turf at a nearby middle school. Better astro turf than dirt, I say, which is the reality of most other school fields. (Food for thought: can something be called a field if it is merely a swath of dirt?) Anyhoo, Joe played touch rugby for about an hour and a half with these guys. For those who don't know, "touch rugby" is basically tag rugby; in other words, they don't pulverize each other's bodies. They played on a third of the astro turf field; the other two thirds were taken up by errant school boys playing soccer, and by playing soccer, I mean kicking balls at the exterior of the school.

Joe had a great time, and I really enjoyed watching. I've missed watching rugby; there's something about it for me....ever since I started going to games and gotten over the brutality of it (in fact, now I appreciate it as being what I perceive as a sort of hardcore Knights of the Round Table brotherhood) and seeing guys getting their heads stitched up on the sidelines, I find it is something I crave watching. The guys were really welcoming and kind to Joe, which is another thing I love about rugby. Even if you smash some dude's face into astro turf, you'll still get a pint afterward and share a laugh. This is good stuff.

Joe will be playing in a tournament in Daegu in a couple of weeks. Neither of us can wait. :)