Korea\u2019s<\/a> first gold medal of the games. It was a wonderful experience to be in the crowd for that athletic feat and share in a genuine moment of Korean national pride. On a side note, I also got to see Great Britain\u2019s first medal \u2013 a bronze! While the excitement and atmosphere were something to behold, for obvious reasons, skeleton is probably a bit more enjoyable on TV.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/James-olympic-blog-2.jpg\")
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Later in the day, we headed away from the Olympic Sliding Centre to the main Olympic Park for a more spectator friendly event – curling. Curling is great to watch live because you can watch multiple games at once. This is particularly useful when you\u2019re cheering for multiple countries. Also, unlike skeleton, it\u2019s a great way to take in an event without freezing. The standard of curling was extremely impressive and a real treat to watch. After the curling, we had a few hours to head out and explore the rest of the Olympic Park.<\/p>\n
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No trip to the Olympic Park is complete without a trip to the staggeringly large gift shop. The mascot of the Olympics, Soohorang, was extremely popular and could be found incorporated into every conceivable commodity. If you think that getting tickets to the Olympics is competitive, just wait until you want one of the few remaining stuffed Soohorang dolls! I settled for a more modest \u2018Pyeongchang 2018\u2019 hat and picked up some knick-knacks for friends and family. With a long day behind us, we headed back to Seoul to rest up for the following day\u2019s festivities.<\/p>\n
Our second day was going to be a little different from the first because we did not have tickets to any of the events; however, we had tickets to the next best thing: Canada Olympic House. This is Canada’s home\u00a0away from\u00a0home during the Olympics, and for the first time,\u00a0it was open to the public. It was a real treat to meet the athletes and have a little taste of home (for Shannan, anyway). It was quite surreal sit to cheering on the Canadian men\u2019s hockey team with hundreds of other people and then have a drink and a bite to eat with the team just a couple of hours later.\u00a0 The athletes and their families were extremely welcoming and gracious with their time. As you can see below, Eric Radford was more than happy to let Shannan hold the gold medal he won in the figure skating team event. After a full day of events, our fill of poutine, and more than a few Canadian beers, our experience at Pyeongchang 2018 had come to an end, but it would be one that we would never forget.<\/p>\n
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James Davis, originally from the UK, taught English in the Czech Republic and South Korea before relocating to Canada and joining Oxford Seminars. Among his many duties, he is the host of \u2018The Teaching Abroad Pod\u2019. He spends his days playing and watching soccer, going on adventures with his wife and their dog, Ziggy, and cooking foods inspired by his travels.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During my time teaching in South Korea, I tried to make it to as many sporting events as possible. Mostly, this consisted of watching Jeonbuk Hyundai dominating the K-League or trying to comprehend what was happening while watching Kia Tigers play baseball. Over the years, there were also some bigger occasions: I managed to see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":5422,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,315,24,31,25,26,28,343],"tags":[196,8,87,97,90,102],"class_list":["post-5416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-countries","category-food-abroad","category-getting-tefl-certified","category-korea","category-life-abroad","category-switching-cultures","category-tesol-stories","category-travel","tag-adventure","tag-culture","tag-esl","tag-korea","tag-teaching-english-abroad","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5423,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5416\/revisions\/5423"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxfordseminars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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