Boryeung Mud Festival

This was the best deal in the history of ever and even the days before ever began.

We paid the Community Relations Dude from Chungnam University 20 bucks each and the OAF and I got three meals and a round trip to the Boryeung Mud Festival. The trip to the place was epic enough, and I hope to get to it tomorrow, but the festival itself was grand. It was raining in the morning and numbers were down, so the place, while crowded, was tolerable. It was also wickedly hot and despite the on-and-off rain, I manage to procure and epic Redneck sunburn.

Still, it was so much fun I begged the Chungnam guy to put me on his mailing list. This week I'll drop off a DVD of photos and hope that cheap gift is enough. ;-)

The festival is set on the beach and it is little more than a bunch of things that effulge mud. Which sounds simple, but is actually astoundingly entertaining. The first thing is the rather wide range of bodies in rather wide range of dishabille (I'm sure I spelled that wrong). The festival not only draws a lot of Koreans, but foreigners from all over Korea as well.

Diplomatically, I can only say that some foreigners have... uh, inaccurate body images.

Also, a few have French taste in beach-wear.

This combines spectacularly, but most often in spectacular fail.

There were also quite a lot of USMK guys around, which gives Boryeung fitful problems. The Marmot opines in his usual suspicious way, the town wants the big-breasted white-chicks, but not so much the waeguk dudes they bring with them, particularly the Army guys. Well, at least the idiots who try carjackings!

No problems (I could see) while we were there and I spent most of my time taking shots of the mud-coated throngs including a couple of Army guys who had found the cool colored mud:



The most stoned-looking Korean guy I have ever seen:


A happy large woman:


Two Korean dudes who had also found the psychedelic mud and seemed pretty depressed about the whole thing...




You could get muddy in a variety of ways, including the mud slides:


As you worked your way back out of mud, you took a shower under the spitting pig


Which was mighty refreshing



And then it was off to the sauna (Korean style) or the public shower (also Korean style.. by which I mean very cold water!). I got out of my shower and while I was toweling off I kept getting sprayed by water. I looked around, but everyone else was pretty involved in their own showers and not hosing me down whenever I turned my back. So, you know, that fantasy of making a friend in the communal shower kind of died.

I finally realized that, outside, the skies had really opened up and that I was being hit by water coming through holes in the ceiling. We all hustled back to the bus (except the two guys who got lost and held us up for about 30 minutes)

The way back was through a wild rainstorm and the evening ended with a delicious bowl of Samgyetang - which is a whole chicken stuffed with rice, dates, ginseng and other good stuff. The trick is the chicken is cooked in your bowl. This is normally served on the three hottest days of the Korean year (well, the three days said to be the hottest annually), so I think it must have been Chobok, Jungbok or Malbok, though I am far too lazy to look. ;-)