Mud Festival

I've gotten the pictures from Emily now, so I've added them below. Yea.

The annual Mud Festival on the west coast in Boryeong was in July. The agency that I got my job through arranged about a million buses in various cities and booked motel rooms for us to make everything easier and to guarantee accommodation. The town gets pretty busy for the nine days of the festival. The organizers also decided to send out the buses on Friday night, because it's quite a long drive from a lot of areas in Korea, and they figured it would be nice to get there late Friday night/Saturday morning and sleep in a bit on Saturday instead of having to get up at o'dark-thirty on Saturday and spend half the day on a bus.

I think this picture represents me and Leon pretty well:



We arrived at about 5am on Saturday and I had a lot of trouble sleeping (I had to use my towel as a pillow, because they place was so booked they ran out of the extra bedding that is usually provided in a room), so I got up around 11 and went outside to get some breakfast and czech things out.

I was a bit worried when I got there. It was raining, and I saw the mudslide, mud pool, etc....







...but there was no mud. For a while I was afraid that the Mud Fest organizers were going to cancel the festival for the day because it was raining--as if mud and water didn't mix. Most of what was going on was people walking around with umbrellas, looking for food and/or something to do, and some people were entertaining themselves on the beach.



After I found some food, I went back to the motel room to rouse Leon, Miker, and Emily from bed, possibly hung over from drinking on the bus all night. (It actually took us nearly an hour longer to get to Boryeong than it should have, because practically everyone was drinking for most of the six hours on the bus, and people had to get off to piss every hour or so.)


After everyone was up and ready to go, we went out again to find them some food and see what was going on. By that time, there was actually some mud around, but for the first hourish, we weren't really into it because it was pretty chilly out. Some people were going through mud obstacle courses and pools and slides, but it was just muddy water. Didn't really seem worth it.

We walked down the beach a while, and the rain stopped at some point. The others got a bunch of beer and we parked on a sitting platform (they're popular outside shops in Korea) for a bit while they drank. At one point I went to the bathroom and accidentally sliced a piece of my finger off when I hit it on the metal panel that covers the toilet paper. Before I even realized it had happened, I'd bled all over myself and the floor (where the hell did all this blood come from? I thought at first), and that made me feel kind of sick for a while. It also meant I had to be really careful not to fill the wound with mud, and it stung like a sonofabitch whenever I went into the salt water.



Upon walking further down the beach to the other end of the festival area, we discovered a huge mud fight that was going on next to a bunch of sand sculptures. There were these columns of really good, thick mud that people were pulling off from and throwing chunks at each other with. Someone slammed me right in the eye. That sucked.



The canopy over the mud and the illogically closely parked cars were also getting covered. We were all wondering what kind of idiots would park, or designate a parking lot, so close to the action, but we later found out that those columns of mud had actually been sculptures that morning, and all us dirty, inconsiderate foreigners were desecrating the art. That kind of sucks, but it actually was the best mud in the whole place, therapeutic-like. I covered myself pretty completely two or three times, then washed it off in the ocean. Good times.



Everyone looks stronger covered in mud.

Later, after walking around for a while, getting some snacks or something, and generally hanging out, we went back to the fight, but the police were there at that time, breaking up the battle hours after it had begun, and cordoning off the area where the mud sculptures once stood. Inconceivably, they went fascist on the scene and wouldn't allow anyone into the square area with the mud, now covering the ground thickly, despite that there were only a few people around and there was pretty much no more damage to do. Most people seemed to just want to take pictures in there with the mud, or grab some to cover themselves with, although Leon and Miker and a few others would discretely lob stray handfuls of mud over the canopy onto unsuspecting passersby and observers. I saw one guy whose SUV was parked about a foot from the canopy, who was dumping buckets of water over his car to clean it off enough to drive it away. It probably took him a long time, since he only had once bucket and I guess he had to walk pretty far to refill it with fresh water. It was probably a pretty pricey car wash he had to get later. Poor guy.

As evening hit, a concert began, and there were some hoses spraying water at the dancing crowd for a few minutes. We did a bit more swimming and sitting, then the others wanted to drink more beer or something, and I was getting pretty exhausted, not having slept as soundly as they had. So I went back to the room to shower and rest for a bit, effectively ending my participation in the festival. Later we had Korean food and hung out drinking on the beach with some other teachers from Ulsan until it was bedtime. We left at noon the next day for the long trip back. It infuriated me that we woke up to beautiful sunny and hot weather on Sunday, and it was going to be a great day for the festival, which we didn't have time to partake in prior to leaving. I've been trying to get to the beach as often as I can to make up for all of June and half of July being rainy, although this weekend I was too busy with various things to get there. Next weekend for sure.