Rolling in Mud - Boryeong Mud Festival.

Korea is known for their festivals.  In the few months I've been here, I've been to a few - the Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival, the Lotus Lantern Festival in Seoul (and like 3 others in Seoul the same weekend), and the Pumba Festival in Eumseong. This past weekend, I added the most interesting and intriguing festival to the list - the Boryeong Mud Festival.  Since orientation, I had heard about this festival and that it was a "must see" - which of course made me want to go. A package of accommodation and roundtrip bus leaving from Daegu was set up by one of our EPIK members and with a few friends, I signed up for what I was sure to be a ridiculously dirty weekend. literally.

What is a mud festival you ask? well according to Wikimedia (which had the most concise summary I could pull from) it is an annual festival which takes place over 10 days in July in the small city of Boryeong (a beach town on the West coast). The first Mud Festival was staged in 1998 and, by 2007, the festival attracted 2.2 million visitors to Boryeong. The mud is taken from the Boryeong mud flats, and trucked to the Daecheon beach area, where it is used as the centrepiece of the 'Mud Experience Land'.  The mud is considered rich in minerals and used to manufacture cosmetics. The festival was originally conceived as a marketing vehicle for Boryeong mud cosmetics.  However, as can be seen in the numbers of visitors, it has evolved into a fun festival for all. 


Now that you kind of have a slight idea of the history, I'm sure you can understand the allure.  When else will I be able to attend a mud festival where you purposely get muddy and get to hang out on the beach?

At the early hour of 8:30 on Saturday, we boarded the buses and headed off for Boryeong.  4 hours and one very windy road later (we all know how I felt about that), we made it.  Unfortunately, there was a little miscommunication between our bus drivers and the set up, and we were dropped off in pouring rain with no idea where our accommodation was.  A little confusion and 10 minutes of walking later, we found our accomodation - a pension.  It's a traditional style motel basically with the rooms sans beds and just mats, blankets and pillows to sleep on the floor with. Basic, minimal, but do-able.  We (friends Orla, Amy, Jamie, and I) changed into mud appropriate attire and headed back to the beach/mud festival area.

Luckily, the rain stopped before we even left our pension and the weather was beautiful the rest of the weekend without a drop of rain!  We met up with Loren and attempted the festival.  It was a typical festival in the aspects of white tents selling random trinkets and typical festival food - my favorite are the corn dogs! The festival area was crowded. People literally covered head to toe in mud were just walking around like it's the most normal thing it the world.  This festival attracts tons of foreigners (I saw one statistic that one year it was 89% foreigners) so it was almost culture shock to see SO many foreigners that I could potentially communicate with! Sidenote: I can only imagine how overwhelming it will be to come back to the US and have most people speak my language! ah!

The main mud part of the festival is in a gated off area that contains tons of huge blown up slides, a mud wrestling pit, different relay games, and a fun blown up obstacle course - all covered in mud. Saturday it was extremely crowded, so we only did the obstacle course but it was so fun! The rest of Saturday was spent attempting to get clean in the ocean and eventually going back to the room for showers.  We spent the evening walking around the area, met interesting people, and even saw a popular Korean pop group Dal Shabet perform - my students this week are very impressed!

There was also an amazing  fireworks show sent off from a platform out on the ocean....so fantastic! I may have missed 4th of July back home, but at least I got to see fireworks in July!

After a night of poor sleep (mostly from just trying to sleep on the floor), we got up ready for another day of mud.  We hit the gated area first and the lines were MUCH better. We spent a few hours playing in the mud....and consequently spent at least that much time if not more attempting to get clean.  By the afternoon, we were exhausted, becoming sunburnt, and ready to go home.  It took us awhile and I'm pretty sure some people missed the buses, but we made it home to Daegu about 8pm.  What a weekend.  I am so glad I decided to go.  When else in life will I have the opportunity to get muddy at a festival abroad? probably never.  I'm just soaking up every experience - because most of these are once-in-a-lifetime chances.

Bringing my digital camera during the day would've been camera suicide, so I bought a disposable camera and took some mud pictures.  I need to finish the roll of *gasp!* film, get it developed (and the pics on CD) and then I'll update this so you can see the mud I'm talking about. :]  It'll probably be a few weeks until that happens...because I'm leaving for China next Tuesday!