Playing golf in Korea

Seongkon Kim, or Doctor Kim as everyone calls him, is an avid golfer, very avid I should say. Like many other countries it is quite expensive to play real golf, except for the US for some reason. Most other places in the world it is a rich man’s game, expensive memberships and tee fees.
To keep the costs down to a reasonable level, there are a couple of alternatives that people use, like driving range and screen golf. The latter is kind of a computer game, but with real clubs and balls.
Computer sensors keep track of the angle of the ball, swing of the club and direction of the ball to make it a pretty realistic game. So good that it is almost comparable with a real game.

We went to a screen golf game the first evening, just to make me totally sleepy and my eyes more red that already. We ordered beer and soju, which of course is a fundamental part of golfing. I had only been to the driving range 2 times and can’t claim that I have proper golfing habits. I probably have a tendency to add too much hockey style to the game, but at least I could hit the ball. Well, rewind just a minute. Since I was new at this and didn’t want to totally lose face, I swung the club as if the little ball was going to die – and hit the ground with the club. Ok, one more swing and the ball went off into the blue sky. I hit it.
Next time I had to shoot again, I took the expensive driver of Doctor Kim and was about to kill another ball, when I noticed the head of the club being loose. The composite material had broken and was just hanging on to several fibers, oh shit.
Doctor Kim calmed me down that it was only a $200 club and there should still be some kind of warranty on it… Wasn’t sure if he was just saying that to be nice, but it did feel a little bad breaking his nice gear on the very first try.

The rest of the evening I was playing at 50% only, a little afraid of ruining the rest of Doctor Kim’s gear, and concentrated on the beer and soju, that I know how to handle. It was actually quite funny to try out, not sure if I have the patience to be a great golfer though. My talent, if any, seems to be on the far distance driving, whereas putting that little shitty white ball in the hole is very stressful. How can people enjoy that? Must increase the stress level significantly and add to a lot of heart attacks, I am sure

After golf it was time to get some food again, because it was already 1am at night and we had not been eating at least for 3 hours. More beer and soju of course, Yumi seemed to want to extend the party until the early morning. A few more beers later I was almost sleeping at the table. 32 hours since we had left San Diego, I was game over.