After a five-day weekend where I gloriously overslept almost every day, it's time to pay the piper.  I couldn't get to sleep until 3:30 on Wednesday night (and NOT, as one might expect, due to Borderlands; I responsibly turned that off at a very respectable hour.)  Then I got up for work, and then I had the first lesson of this semester's Korean class, and finally I went to Psy's free concert last night.  All of this meant I didn't get to bed until one.

The concert is the really interesting story here.  First of all, you have to understand that Koreans are VERY nationalistic.  The kinder side of me supposes you have to be when you inhabit a tiny country between two much larger, much more aggressive countries.  The less kind side says it's fucking annoying, especially when you have to hear about it all the time.  Either way, Koreans have a huge amount of pride in their country, and any Korean who makes it big overseas is elevated, at least temporarily, to godlike status.  Psy (Gangnam Style guy for those of you who aren't so up on pop culture) is absolutely adored here.

Well, last night he did a free concert at the park outside City Hall as, I suppose, a way of thanking Korean fans for their support.  According to the news yesterday, fifty thousand people were expected to attend.  According to the news today, eighty thousand actually attended, though I have no idea how this calculation was made as there were no ticket sales or anything like that.  This plaza, by the way, is a spacious but not by any means huge area.  It's also right in the middle of downtown, meaning streets had to be closed and buses diverted during the event.

During the World Cup, Korea's games are also televised on the huge screens around City Hall, and at least as many people gather there to watch.  When Paul and I went a few years ago, the crowd was packed so tightly that we literally couldn't move; at one point, trying to get in, I got stuck behind a row of people who just wouldn't (or couldn't) budge, so Paul actually reached in, lifted me out over people's heads, and pulled me next to him, drawing applause from those around us.  This is the sort of situation I was dealing with last night, only without a 6'8 wrestler to help out.

I say "I"; Chris and I had planned to meet up, but when I got there he was already well inside and wouldn't come back out to meet me for whatever reason.  He'd texted a general idea of where he was, but I was totally unable to get through the crowd to that spot (or, more to the point, it would have taken me all night) and when I tried to go back out the way I had come in to swing around the outside where there would be fewer people, I discovered the police were standing shoulder to shoulder in a solid line around the outside of the plaza and were letting people out but not in, so even if I had got out to a less crowded area, I wouldn't have been able to get back inside to Chris.  I ended up just staying there, about three rows of people in from the police line, as there was a tiny bit of room to breathe and I could actually see the screen showing the concert (if not the show itself) most of the time.

This was somewhat of a luxury, by the way; on my way out later I passed the MBC TV vans, and there was a substantial lineup outside the door of one van that had tiny little screens inside showing the concert.  I assume they were, uh, doing whatever TV people do with that footage.  They probably don't usually do it with thirty people watching outside, though.

Psy opened with the Korean national anthem, which was totally unimpressive to the people in my section; actually, they were quite subdued for a concert, standing still and expressionless most of the time.  The only song that really got them going was, of course, Gangnam Style... which, of course, was left until the end of the concert.  Before that there was a lot of talking, none of which was more than a murmur to me as I was so far away, a couple of fast songs, and a lot of slow ballads.  Basically, standard K-pop fare as far as I could tell.  I'd love to do a more in-depth report on this, but I kind of hate K-pop with very few exceptions.  I was pretty much just waiting for Gangnam Style (one of those exceptions; I don't love it, but it's kind of cute and catchy), and I have to say that it was worth the wait to see the entire plaza go nuts and do the horse dance in unison.  There was a huge exodus after that, though oddly, not such a huge exodus that I couldn't get a seat on the subway going home.