The 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang
Downtown Gangneung
After our two days in Seoul, we got on a really comfortable bullet train to Gangneung, the larger city that acted a jumping-off point for Olympic events. PyeongChang is the county in which the Olympics took place, and there were five different facilities with one to five structures within them for different types of sports. Gangneung is a mid-size working-class city nestled into the foot of the mountains and surrounded by really beautiful scenery. We stayed in what seemed to be a country cabin up the hills and even found a local bathhouse! I had some paranoia throughout our stay because I had become a fan of Na Hong-jin and his film The Wailing. The woods behind our house looked a lot like the woods in the film and I got a little bit scared when the sun went down that a demon would come down the mountain and possess us (it never happened). Despite my paranoia, I thought it was fun to be in an adult flophouse and make breakfast for one another every morning. One of my friends went ultra-Korean and cooked eggs with a sheet mask.
We saw hockey, downhill skiing and snowboarding, biathlon, cross country skiing, and my friends saw a lot of bobsledding, but I opted to check out the cultural centers and events instead. I had never been to the Olympics, but I was really surprised to find all of the pavilions dedicated to Korean food, products, history, arts, and culture. My favorite was near the Jongsseon Alpine Center, I think because it was so far out of the way of other events, organizers created something for people to explore beyond the sports events. They had a performance hall, a food hall where you could try hundreds of different regional Korean dishes, and another hall full of different Korean products.
An astounding number of buses are utilized for transporting people around the Olympics
Traveling between the facilities could take up to an hour; it was like being at the most gigantic music festival I could have imagined, with people and athletes from all over the world. Everything related to navigating the Olympics was really easy, and I was perpetually bewildered by the scale of the logistics. Getting from place to place was facilitated by huge fleets of buses timed for different events. We also rented cars so that we could get from our cabin to the transit points each day. Navigating Korean highways was wild because none of our U.S.-based navigation apps worked there, but luckily I did not have to drive. Once we were at the transit hub however, everything else was easy. I never saw more than one or two events in a day and I think that is all I could really handle. It was so cold that watching outdoor events was really physically taxing, Even with three layers of pants and tops, two hats, a neck warmer, and hand and feet warmers I was still usually shivering by the end of an hour or so. Food options at the events were also pretty limited to stadium-type food, so not particularly nutritious and mostly fried.
Map of the Olympic facilities from mapofworld.com
All that physical exhaustion was worthwhile however, when we got to watch South Korean snowboarder Sang-ho Lee win silver in the parallel giant slalom. The crowd was jam-packed with Korean people screaming and singing at the top of their lungs, and the energy was incredible. All of the other spectators who did not have an athlete to cheer for were also rooting for him. The joy on his face when he saw that he had medalled was palpable, and it was reflected by the sea of people watching. I am getting a little bit teary-eyed thinking about that moment now.
I did not have any expectations around the Olympics or how they would feel, but I was really happy it was a place where patriotism seemed to be left behind. Everybody cheered for everyone, and people from all different countries were cheering for, and wearing the flags or national colors of, people from everywhere else. I was excited when a U.S. athlete won, but I was more excited about the athleticism, and as far as I could tell that was really the focus for a lot of spectators as well. A lot of South Korean spectators were wearing these adorable little party hats with flags from different countries.
In certain moments during the events I was able to forget the racist, capitalist, and imperial notion of national borders and focus on the nature of people and sport. There is such beauty in the different ways that shared human values or needs show up across the world. I am so grateful and privileged to be able to participate in something like an Olympic event — it was an expensive endeavor of money and time. I left exhausted, but really positive about the resiliency of human empathy and compassion. It made me excited to learn more about a lot of different athletes and cultures to which I had never been exposed.
