Friday afternoon Bryan and I dropped the kids over at Zoe’s friends house. They were looking forward to a fun sleepover, and we were looking forward to an overnight date!
We rushed home, hopped the on the scooter, and caught the next train to Seoul. It’s a Korean holiday – Buddha’s birthday – so we checked the traffic and decided driving would be perilous. The Seoul Jazz Festival was taking place at Olympic Park; a huge city park that still has the big arena’s from the Olympics. Well, MIKA was just one of 3 headliners playing this evening at the three different concert area’s. The Jazz Festival was huge; bands began playing around noon and continued all day…tomorrow, too. It was big and very well attended. I didn’t expect that in Seoul!!
Our goal was simply to see MIKA, so we got our wristbands, grabbed some food, and found our way into the ‘Sparkling Dome’ arena. HUGE! The last band was finishing up, but I wanted to get in and make sure we had a good spot. No reserved seats. We decided the standing area right up front would be best, so we pushed through the departing crowd until we couldn’t get any closer. So, crammed standing next to a bazillion Koreans we had 45 minutes to wait for MIKA. It actually went fairly quickly as we watched them setup the stage. Then… the lights went out and here he came!!
I love MIKA’s music, and he is so much better in concert. We were about 20 feet from the stage and as people danced and the show went one we got even closer!! So close! So awesome. He got everyone dancing and singing and it was just the best show ever!!! The big shocker to me was how packed it was. I expected the standing area to be full, but the whole arena was full! 20,000 people they said! And I expected mostly westerners or expats, but we were some of the very few non-Koreans. Awesome, too, was that the only tall Korean moved out of the way halfway through and we had an even better view.
After the show we got a gyro, watched some Jazz in the outdoor arena, and walked back to our hotel. This morning we took the train back to Songtan and picked up the kids. They did great sleeping over night. We even got to watch the Memorial Day parade on base, which was super fun.
