Mud Fest!

Greetings all,

The Boryeong Mud Festival started last Saturday and I was in attendance. Boryeong is famed for its mud which is rich in minerals and is apparently very good for your skin. Every year they dump a load of this mineral mud down by the beach and set up a ‘Mud Experience Land’ for the good people of South Korea to revel in. Though to be fair, it attracts more foreigners than Koreans. Koreans are conservative folk and I guess there is something a tad hedonistic about a bunch of scantily clad young people spending nine days writhing about in the mud, their bodies smeared with filth.  Upon entering the festival grounds one is inevitably greeted by the sight of an orgy of mud covered limbs coming at ya like an angry brown octopus and I guess this is a tad shocking for anyone with delicate sensibilities.

We finished work at half nine on Friday night and caught the bus to Boryeong at ten. We were joined by 50 other ‘waeguks’ (Korean for foreigners). The bus was a ‘Norebang’ bus which means it was equipped with its very own karaoke machine so we were able to sing and make merry all the way there. Some of the English translations (or more aptly mistranslations) on the Karaoke screen were most hilarious. The line ‘So many times, it happens too fast’ in Eye of the Tiger was transcribed as ‘Knock on the door, I’m having a bath.’ 

 The journey took about four hours as we had to make many pit-stops due to the copious amounts of drinking that went on in the bus’s environs. When we arrived we dumped our stuff in our minbak and then went out for the night. We were actually very fortunate in our choice of room at the minbak. My group was one of the first to reach our new abode so we got our pick of the litter. Our room was one of the few to have its own bathroom and there were only 5 people sleeping on the floor (6 if you count the drunk girl who wandered in on the second night.) The minbak provides you with bedding which you can avail of to make your nest in the corner of the room as there are no beds. Tis not the most comfortable of arrangements but it's cheap and that’s all that matters.

On our first night we went to the beach for a while. Some people went swimming and some played with fireworks. Then we went in search of booze and chicken. We arrived back at the minbak at about 5 in the morning. We probably would have reached our abode a tad sooner if we had not accidently ventured into the wrong minbak. But in our defence, all those buildings look inconveniently alike.Upon finding the right minbak we slumbered for about four hours and then woke up in the morning feeling as fresh as recently trampled daisies.

After a refreshing breakfast of tuna wrapped in rice and seaweed we went down to the beach to join in the festivities. There were many attractions to behold including a mud pool, mud slides, mud prison and coloured mud body paint. We had a gay old time splashing about in the mud and only left when the combination of mud and rain made things a little too liquidy. We therefore went slip sliding away back to our minbak. I don’t have a whole lot of photos from the day’s activities as mud and cameras do not a good combination make. However, here are a few to feast your eyes on. I think my favourite photos are the ones of the rather politically incorrect mud people statues that just look like white people in black-face. 

After we had washed the mud from our bodies we went back to the beach to set up camp. I had not been long at the beach before disaster struck; I wandered off from my party for a few moments and got swallowed up in the throngs of mud people. This was very unfortunate for me as I was born without a sense of direction and for many years I have been afflicted by an inability to find my way home. I wandered about for a while but I couldn’t see anybody I knew as the beach was long and teeming with people. Usually it is easy to find a foreigner in Korea as we stick out like, well foreigners in a country full of Asian natives. However, the mud festival was riddled with round eyes. It was therefore impossible to find anybody as all foreigners look alike. Luckily I was befriended by a group of Columbians and a man from El Salvador. I ended up spending the next 4 hours discussing the merits of Spanish poetry with the man from El Salvador. When evening fell the men rather chivalrously offered to escort me back to my minbak. This was no easy feat as I genuinely had no idea where it was and could only remember the names of a smattering of vague landmarks in the area. However, the men delivered me at my doorstep safe and sound. I arrived just in time to join a group of people who were going for an indoor barbeque and after being fed and watered all was well with the world again. There was a large stage on the beach built for the purpose of entertaining the masses with live music. I later learned that the whole time that I was lost on the beach I was at one side of the stage and my friends were on the other. D’oh.

On Saturday night we went down to the beach to watch a fireworks display and do some beach-time drinking. Then we retired to bed while it was still early enough as we were bleedin’ knackered. The next day we packed our trunks and said goodbye to the Mud Festival. The ride home was a more subdued affair than the journey up as most people were hung-over and sleepy so we just watched a movie on the bus to while away the time until our arrival in Jinju.

The Mud Fest came at a good time as things have been a little stressful at work. There have been more dramatic exits on the part of disgruntled staff and more tomfoolery on the part of our boss. I was feeling rather stressed on Friday because of the situation at work and a number of other things and one of the Korean teachers noticed this. She therefore decided, in a rather unusual move, to throw me a surprise birthday party. I was just coming to the end of a laborious 75 min evening class when some of the teachers walked into the classroom armed with a birthday cake. They proceeded to turn off the lights and ordered the kids to serenade me with a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday.’ This was of course highly baffling to me as my birthday was 5 months ago. They told me that the cake was an effort to cheer me up. It was a noble gesture to be sure but the whole thing was a little too surreal for me, not to mention highly mortifying. These kids are ruthless, if you show any sign of weakness they will lose all respect for you and become unmanageable in the classroom. Therefore, telling the kids that I was sad and making them sing to me was a not a good way of maintaining my reputation as a serious and dignified teacher. Sigh, they will never respect my authoritah again. The teachers meant well though I’m sure.

Anyway, that’s all my news. Hope all is well in the Motherland. 

P.S. Here is a pic of a hotel that is rather inappropriately named 'Full House' advertising vacancies. It made me chuckle.