Second Time's the Charm!

Getting Geared up for the race!

As I (Courtney) said before….I was GOING to see Bolt run! And I did! Of course, it wasn’t as easy as I had first though, but it still happened.

The first step was recruiting someone to join me. The people I went with last time were busy, and everyone from Pohang wasn’t interested. Luckily, I remembered my friend Ashli had mention she was heading to Daegu for the weekend. I called her up and asked her to go. She had to think for a while, but she was in! She asked if she could bring a friend. Of course I said yes, and the plan was settled!

We met up Saturday morning, where I met Ashli’s friend Kristen and all HER friends. She is part of the program TALK, which is another program for English teachers in Korea. She brought a couple of the new Talk members who brought a few of their friends who brought a few of their friends, until there were about 8 of us.

The idea was to scalp tickets. The rumor was that if you walked toward the ticket booth, you would be absolutely swarmed with people trying to tell you tickets!! Well, when we arrive we had no such luck. Nobody wanted to sell us anything! We looked at the schedule and realized that we were extremely early. The races didn’t start till 7:00, and it was only 2:00! Perhaps there would be tickets to buy later in the day!

So we waited….but that wasn’t so bad. There was a lot do do. We took pictures, got free stuff, ate snacks, took more pictures. It was fun. At one point we just sat down and waited. After a while we started noticing all these people in like at the ticket booths. At first we disregarded it, because we knew the tickets were sold out. Then we saw people buying the tickets. So then we all rushed in line! Unfortunately, every time we got to the front of the line, the tickets would be sold out. We’d head to another one, and the same thing happened. How were we going to get tickets now?

We were standing around discussing options when someone came up to me and said, “Hey, you guys need a ticket?” He had an extra ticket he had bought, for 40$. I said sure thing, and bought it! OF course, there was no one else with a ticket yet, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from seeing a world record get made!

After that we saw another man running around selling tickets for 80,000. They were pricy, but good seats. His friends had been unable to come, so he was just trying to get their money back for them. I told Ashli, if you want to buy those tickets, I’ll buy one too and sell this one to someone else. She had to think about it for a while, so we told him if we wanted them, we’d find him again. After about 10min, when things were looking grim, she decided to get them! We searched out the guy, ready to buy the tickets, when he told us he had just sold them to someone else!

Crap! So again we started strolling around, looking for someone to buy tickets from. We noticed a lot of people standing around with signs saying “Buy Tickets” but no “Sell Tickets”. Then I noticed that the people holding “Buy Tickets” were different people than I noticed before! THEN I noticed that there were people RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME buying tickets off some family! Oh man it works!! I waited till they left, grabbed their discarded sign, and got to work! I wanted to go see Bolt with my friends!

Because the sign was written in Korean, lots of Korean people kept passing me and looking at it. They thought I must have been so clever to write that sign. Sooo cute! Little blonde girl with a Korean-language sign! Well, it worked! Before I knew it, 2 guys came up to me and sold me 2 tickets, 20$ each! I gave those to my friends and kept working (there were 6-8 people left to get in) Suddenly another man sold me 2 tickets, this time 15 each! By this point I was getting angry. I was holding a sign for my friends friends friends to get into the event that I wanted to see, and every one of them was getting tickets that cost less than my 40$ ticket! Bleah!

What did I do? I passed the sign off to someone else, grabbed my friends, and headed inside to see the show!! We were in good seats for the high jump and the beginning of the 200m! And it was all worth it! We saw a world record being made right in front of our eyes! 

 

Woman's High Jump Final

An extremely tall high jumper

Bolt, hanging out at the starting line.

His victory photographers, following him around the stadium

It turned out everyone was able to get tickets to the show. Some people even got there’s for free! When we were waiting outside for everyone to meet back up (because we had all gotten different seats) I spotted a track start! He was the USA Gold Medal winner of the Long Jump. We hadn’t seen him compete, just receive his gold medal. At first I was nervous to go up to him and ask for a picture, but after seeing a Korean man do it with no problem, I made my move! And….got this picture! 

All in all I was pretty proud of myself. Begging for tickets, watching a World Record happen, and getting a picture with a real Gold Medal winner – that’s crossing 3 more things off my list of things I’ve never done! The list is getting shorter all the time!