savemyseoul's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PININ' FOR THE FJORDS?! Such lovely plumage. :) So the Boryeong Mud Festival was both as fun as I could have possibly expected and far less disastrously drunken, making for a fucking fantastic weekend. All of my pictures are either on other peoples’ cameras or on a disposable [people still make and sell disposable cameras?!] so there should be muddy images of ridiculousness eventually. The festival takes place on Daechon beach, about seven kilometers from the actual Boryeong mud beach — the ‘famous’ mud beach isn’t actually all that accessible for tourism, so they cart massive truckloads of beach mud to Daechon for the ten days of the festival and coat everything in it. You arrive in the center of town, and are immediately, and for the next approximate 36 hours, filthy and wet. It’s glorious. The train from Seoul to Daechon takes about three hours, and then there’s a bus to the beach, so we arrived around 11am. After finding our hotel, alllll the way at the far end of the beach, we headed towards the center of the festival and the ‘mud tables’ where you get splashed, assaulted, painted, coated, and bathed in mud. Some of Lesley’s friends staked out a nice umbrella on the beach, and we all — all, in this case, constituting a substantial fraction of the entire teaching population at my school, having traveled in different groups but joining together for the muddy hell of it — spent the next five hours or so drinking soju, watching ajumas bury themselves in the sand with only visors poking forth, and alternately turning ourselves into amazing mud statuary and then washing off in the ocean. The night featured incredible fireworks, pork galbi, escapades of all sorts, and yet more mud, before I crept into our hotel room and slept under a towel. (Actually, I only slept under a towel for an hour or so; Christina didn’t budge an inch when I tried to snag a corner of the blanket, but she woke up a bit later and was kind enough to share.) And then today Jen and Trish and I staked out another spot on the beach and spent a more sedate day turning ourselves into boiled lobsters. Conclusion: I need to leave Seoul more often. 12:23 a.m. - 2008-07-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||