Summer in Korea is awesome and terrible at the same time and for many different reasons. The terrible part is mostly the scorching heat, the torrential rains, and the legions of mosquitoes, but the awesome parts make up for all the crazy discomforts of the season. The biggest benefit to summer in Korea is festivals, festivals, and more festivals. It seems like, even in our part of the country, they have a summer festival for everything, sand, sun, film, music, every kind of flower, every kind of thing. So, last weekend we ventured with our wonderful language cafe to a city close to Seoul on the coast called Boryeon at a place called Dae Cheon Beach.
A little bit about the festival now. The mud in Boryeon is said to be great for the skin and is used in manufacturing cosmetics. The first mud festival took place in 1998 in an attempt to draw attention to the new products but is now, apparently, one of Asia's most famous festivals attracting around 2.2 million visitors every year and the most foreigners. . .like us! :-)
The mud itself is gray, just totally gray. They also had colored mud for body painting. . .I'm not sure where that was, but we had fun in the gray, mercury-looking mud.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Saturday morning- -Anriette dragged me to the taekwondo gym for the open house at, like, 10 in the morning (Saturday morning!! :-) And it was about 6 million degrees outside, seriously, so we stayed there for a little while not really doing anything, just sort of sitting there, looking really terrible because we were in our mud clothes and he was in a suit. We were there until about 11:30, then we went off to meet our crew at the language cafe.
It's important to point out, even though it really ended up not being a huge problem, that there were 14 of us and we had one vehicle to take there: a 12 passenger van. There were seven Korean, four Russians, two South Africans, one American, bags, food, and a partridge in a pear tree in that van. We were literally traveling across the country to get to the festival so it took about 6 hours. Needless to say, we were a little cozy all packed in there together, but that's what memories are made of, right? :-)
Right.
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| MudFest! |
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| Poor little sardines. This is the back. We were in the row in front of this, for a while. . . |
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| The front two rows. There should be two more heads in the photo, but they were outside of the car at the time. |
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| Our van :-) |
We set off. We went for a couple of hours and then stopped to stretch our legs, run to the restroom, grab some sodas, and then get back on the road. Maybe two hours later, we stopped again for the same thing. Then we got to a toll booth where one of the girls announced that she left her cell phone on the sink at the last rest stop and we had to go back and get it. We looked for it (a little hard to do, obviously, since we weren't terribly mobile) called it, everything. It was apparently on vibrate (and I think the music was on? Anyway) so we turned around to head the half hour back to the last rest stop. She got out and ran to the bathroom to find it. Anriette was clever enough to notice a cell phone sitting on the seat right where the girl's rear end used to be. . .
Then we left again, the same half hour back to the toll booth.
We stopped again at Home Plus (like Walmart) to get some dinner for the beach, then added that food to the human and luggage pile in the van. :-)
We finally got to the beach and it was lovely. There were camp sites all over, but they were a little crowded, and besides, why sleep in a camp site when you can sleep right on the beach!? We'd done it before and it worked out quite well. So, we arrived about 730ish and started setting up for dinner.
Here's the ground we covered:
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| We spanned the country! :-) |
We bought some pork, chicken, bread and cheese (because foreigners HAVE to have cheese. . .and bread. . .in order to make pork and cheese sandwiches. It's just science.)
Jonah brought a couple of grill/gas burners, so everyone got started.
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| Our own little piece of beach. |
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| A realistic view of the beach, from Albert's camera. |
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| An HD version of the beach, from Albert's camera :-) |
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| Getting ready for dinner. |
Dinner was lovely. We all sat around and talked for a little while, then we went off exploring a bit, then grabbed a couple of people and went to a singing room for a bit, then came back and hung out again, then Annie and I left to go exploring after half of the group left to do something else and the other half was getting ready for bed.
Anriette and I found a few very interesting things. Right up the beach from where we were was where the sort of preview part of the mud festival was and there was a big sort of cobblestone square. We walked up to a really cool street break dancing show and watched that for a while. They did a couple of American songs, and a couple of Korean songs that we know by now, and it was a really fun show. Then, sadly, it ended, and we had to look for something else to do. We decided the best plan of action was to sit down in the middle of the street (which was only for pedestrians at this point) and play Rock, Scissor, Paper.
Let me just explain a little about this.
Rock, Scissor, Paper is the definitive decision-making process tool in Korea. The students use it to choose everything. And it's different than it is back home. Thirteen kids can, in one minute, decide who goes from 1 to 13 with no dispute, no arguing, and while we stand there, as their teachers, completely dumbfounded to how they did all that so quickly. But it's not just for students, no-I've seen plenty of real live grownups use this as well. So, of course, we've adopted it. There's a two handed version where you throw a different signal with each hand and say "Ki Bi, Bo!" (rock, scissor, paper. . .not actually, but you say it quickly so it sounds like this) and have both of your hands out, then you say "Hana peg gi!" which means, take away one. The loser has to surrender the inside of their forearm for a two fingered slap from the winner. We played this in the car for about. . .well, long enough for Albert and I to have bruises and Anriette to have long, purple streaks up and down both arms.
So, there we were, sitting on the bricks in the middle of the street, facing each other, throwing out hand signals and taking our turns to be smacked. This had a very unexpected result. I think we had only been doing it about seven or eight minutes when the first group of Korean strangers sat down on the street to join us. We collected four or five different groups of people while we sat there. They would all stay fifteen or twenty minutes and then go off and do something else, we would resume our game, and a few minutes later more people would come to join. So strange.
Albert joined us while the first group was with us and we just chatted and played. More often than not, no one in the joining group spoke any English, but we would still hang out together for twenty minutes or so, just playing games. Pretty cool, actually.
We hung out for a while longer and with tomorrow's rising sun baking us in our tents looming in our minds, we decided it was time to get a little sleep.
We put up our tent on a dock that sold big inner tubes on the beach. Not sure why we decided that was a great idea, but we weren't the only ones camping there. It was a little. . .docky. But the tide came in fast and furiously and every inch of beach was under the water. The waves were so wild that our tent was splashed pretty hard a couple of times. But even suspended over the raging sea, we got a little sleep.
Then at about 7 the next morning, the owner of the dock/inner tube platform came to wake us up. I'm sure it was a lot of "what are you doing here? Get off of my dock!" or something, or at least that's how it sounded to us but we tried as hard as we could to sleep through it, until we realized where we were. So, we moved into the grass and slept a little more.
Anriette and I slept through breakfast but I still had a couple of bagels from the day before, so that wasn't such a big deal. And at about 10 or so the next morning we were off to the festival, which was within walking distance up the beach from the campsite.
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| The breakfast we missed. Pork and freshly caught clams. |
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| What we were doing to miss it. |
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| Our little camp site. |
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| Peace. . .and mud. |
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| Mud and. . .Lady Gaga? |
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| "We're the three best friends that anyone could have!" |
We walked for a while and then we saw it! People collected and covering themselves with mud. This was definitely going to be awesome.
There was a gated off section of the festival that had mud pools, mud slides, mud. . .well, you name it.
Outside of the gated part there were stands filled with mud and paintbrushes to, obviously, paint yourself with. :-) Awesome. It took us about fifteen seconds (miles ahead of the rest of our group) to get covered. :-)
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| We painted Albert first, obviously. |
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| Then Anriette and I painted each other. Or at least, our faces. |
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| Then, literally, about 50 people took pictures of us. |
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| This was after our quite gentle attack of Ji Young. |
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| "Legen- - - |
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| - - -dary!" |
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| There was this guy who didn't want to get muddy but wanted to be in a picture with muddy people. . .he chose us. . .and we made him pay for his cleanliness! |
We bought our tickets, went into the park, and immediately in line for the mud pool.
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| Waiting to get seriously dirty. Ji Young on her way in! |
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| The mud felt so awesome, just slick and smooth, and fantastic on the face, eh Anriette? |
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| We took turns splashing/dunking/drowning each other in the mud until we were essentially saturated. |
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| Saturated and happy. |
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| Very, very happy :-) |
Then we were on to the next thing. Mud prison. You stood in this little cave and they mercilessly pelted you with buckets of mud until you begged for your life and some people, a fortunate few, were able to escape, like this little guy.
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| It's hard to get mud out of your eyes when your hands are covered in mud. . .fun fact to know and tell! |
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| The mud obstacle course. |
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| The mud fiends. Ji Young the gangster in the middle. |
We stood in line for a while to go on the water slide because it looked so incredibly epic. And it was.
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| Here's me about to crush Anriette. |
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| You had to climb up the slide first while they sprayed you with hoses, and then you slid down the completely vertical slide of mud and awesomeness. Awesome. |
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| Ji Young about to crash into Albert :-) |
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| I think they got haunted a little on the way down. . . |
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| Our braids turned into sculptures. . .pretty cool. |
After we had our fill of being covered in mud, we went to the pool to rinse off.
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| The beginning of a water fight. . . |
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| Getting all the mud out of our hair was. . .challenging. |
Then we went to the beach. It was a glorious day and the water on that side of the country wasn't nearly as impossibly frigid as it is on our side. So, we spent quite a bit of time in there and had several pretty unmissable chicken fights between Anriette and Ji Young. I have to say, as tough as Anriette is, I didn't envy her having to fight Ji Young, that girl is a crazy fighter!
Then we had to eat some lunch because we were insanely hungry. So, some of us went on a drink run and the rest set up another picnic and made pots and pots of Ramen (the food of choice around here to be sure :-)
which we ate with gusto.
We wanted to leave around 2 or 3ish because it was a long way back and everyone was pretty wiped. Four of the people in our group hadn't been with us since the previous day caught up with us and asked for an extra hour to play around because they couldn't because of something or other, so they set the time, we would leave at 3:30.
But, then, they didn't show up. 3:30 came and went, then 4 came and went as well. Then we started to call them, but of course no one answered. Called, called, called then around 4:30 we finally got in touch with them, with the other ten of us standing around the van waiting for them. They showed up around 4:45 or so without a word, we piled back in the van, started off, and instantly most of us fell into comas.
We stopped for dinner and for a few breaks. One of the late girls was pretty sure she had left her phone at a rest stop about 45 minutes away from home which almost lead to a lynching but she did find it, so no need for a hanging.
We got home and fell instantly into our beds. It was about 11:30. Beautiful, beautiful weekend. :-)
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| Thank for reading :-) |
