Day 155: All About Mud

This was one of my best weekends ever here in Korea!!!

Michael, Eric, and I decided to take a road trip down to a small city called Boryeong to check out its annual Mud Festival!  That's right, you heard it - an entire festival devoted to the joys of mud!  Now how cool is *that!*

We left Seoul around 10am and hit the highway that led south down to the Central-West Coast where Boryeong is.  As usual, with it being a festival weekend, traffic was quite bad trying to get out of the city.  For a good hour or more we just crawled along at 10 km/hr. stuck in a giant freeway of clogged traffic.  Traffic finally got moving about half way into our journey.  We decided to stop at this small town for lunch along the way, and also to buy a car stereo!  Michael's tape player had broken on our last rafting trip and the three of us were going stir crazy without any music to bop along to on our trip.  We picked up a cheap CD player, had it installed in less than half an hour, and then were back on the road with tunes cranked the rest of the way!

It was late afternoon by the time we arrived in Boryeong but things were still a hoppin'!  There were crowds all over the beach and plenty of muddy passerby!  Oooh this looks like it's going to be a fun weekend!  We found a fairly inexpensive motel to stay at near the beach, (with a *round bed!*) got changed into our suits, and then made our way over to the beach.  It was quite the spectacle when we arrived!!

The Boryeong Mud Festival really is just that - a festival that's all about mud-filled activities and fun stuff to do all involving mud.  There was mud-wrestling, mud slides, mud volleyball, mud soccer, mud face-painting and body art, mud facials, mud massages...  You name it, if it can have mud in the middle then it was going on!  Apparently in this part of Korea the mud has a lot of healing minerals in it or something (there's also a whole line of cosmetics in Korea that's made with this town's mud) and so the town has just turned it into an annual party.  At least 80% of the people at this festival were foreigners and it was so cool to see hundreds and hundreds of whiteys running around screaming covered in mud!

The most fun is your first 'Mud Initiation!'  Us three boys had shyly stepped into the big mud pit (surrounded by a giant inner tube lining that could bounce off of) and were a little reluctant at first as to how to 'get dirty'.  Fortunately, the other 30 or so people in the ring made that decision for us!  We were tackled and dragged into the centre of the ring only to have every single person in the ring run up and throw and kick mud all over us!  In only five short wonderfully frantic seconds, where you're screaming like a 7-year old girl who's just stepped on a piece of seaweed, while laughing uncontrollably, you become absolutely covered in mud, from head to toe.  Literally your *entire body* (including my precious hair!) becomes caked in mud!  AWESOME!!!

Luckily Boryeong is located right next to Daechon Beach, easily one of Korea's most beautiful beaches.  You can get all dirty and muddy and then run across the soft white sand into the ocean to clean off, only to start all over again!  The festival has a real party atmosphere with everyone drinking and running around chasing each other half-naked.  And I ran into so many friends!  I ran into Joanne, Ailish, and even four of my POLY coworkers!  It seems like every foreigner in Korea was here at the Mud Festival!

That night was really fun too.  They had free rock and pop concerts at a giant stage set-up right on the beach, and then a spectacular fireworks and laser show!  After that it was one ginormous beach party all night long!  The three of us stayed up til like 3am just hanging out at the beach having way too many beers and watching all the antics around us!  There was drunken wrestling matches on the beach, bongo drum jam sessions/sing-a-longs, chicks running around in bikinis giggling Valley-girl giggles, and the proverbial jock guys skinny-dipping in the sea.  Wow!  Where am I?  Korea or 'The MTV American Spring Break in Cancun'???  :-)  It was an amazing night just to hang out and take it all in.  A warm breeze blew softly through the air and it was so nice just to be outside in the fresh ocean air.  Ahhhh...this is the life!