Horse Racing Korean Style!

What a fantastic way to spend your Sunday afternoon - Going to the Racecourse Park in Seoul and betting on a few races. Upon entering the park, you're welcomed by calm Classical music to soothe your mind that is wrecked from the image of the wad of Won you're about to trade in for an afternoon of bets. These people entering are serious about the races. This is business to many, probably most, of them. You can see it in their eyes as they puff away at their cigarettes, pound coffee, and wring their hands, while their eyes follow every stomp and muscle movement those horses make. Indoors, you see them squatting in a corner with betting sheets and today's racer information. They grunt and they concentrate and they stare at those sheets and the screen, trying to spark some abracadabra into the air.
I, on the other hand, prefer to relax, sip on some soju, bet a few rounds with 1,000 Won notes (aka .89 cents), and watch the action. I sat amongst a hundred or so older Korean men, all smoking and hacking up a lung, and smoking WHILE hacking up a lung. Literally. Their lungs were falling out their throats. It was a bit hard to hear to the hooves of the galloping horses while you have a man next to you accumulating a nice round of spit from the depths of his lungs, while coughing in between.
But back to the horse racing! This park is enormous. So, with hundreds upon hundreds of people shouting, the race music going off, and the sun shining on the track, it's hard not to get into the action and scream, throwing in a Korean curse word into the mix for some extra fun. Although I lost in the end, those few moments of racing was still an exhilarating rush.
In the center of the race course lays a completely different scene. A park for the family to stroll around, eat ice-cream, have picnics in cute tree house bungalows, and ride bumper boats! It's like a mini-amusement park where kids can play and mothers can rest under the shade. And all the while, horses are running in circles around them, and men (some women) are betting their lives away just across the way. Two different worlds, in one enormous park, behind the deep green hills, south of Seoul.