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Published: July 14th 2009
Months ago, things started popping up on facebook like, “Korean Mudfestival 1 friend is a fan.” More recently I’ve had conversations like, “Do you know mud festival? Very famous in Korea.” Even more importantly, sandwiched between Turkey’s Camel Wrestling Festival and the UK’s Cheese Rolling Festival, the Boryeong Mud Festival ranks 3rd on a London newspaper’s list of the
‘World’s Weirdest Festivals.’ I’m also proud to mention that the
Testy Fest in Montana made the same list at number fourteen; I know the ridiculousness of that place too well, so we can only imagine what kind of sillyness Korean has in store for their version of the world’s weirdest!
The Boryeong Mud Festival is an annual bash that takes place every summer for one week on perhaps the only true beach on Korea’s west coast, Daecheon Beach, 2.5 hours southwest of Seoul. The town of barely 100,000 swells up during this time with the onslaught of 1.5 million visitors. According to Wikipedia, the mud, transported from Boryeong, is considered rich in minerals and is used to manufacture cosmetics. As you can most likely gather, slathering your entire body in this ‘delicacy’ is not only the minimum, but the norm for the weekend.
Cass, Reagan, Leandra, and Jo met up in Seoul on Friday. After goin ‘adventure race’ through the subway station, the bus didn’t end up leaving for 2.5 hours. Reagan, true to his entertaining nature grabbed the bus’ p.a. from alcohol induced ‘Molly,’ and did some crowd control. With that shenanigan in the rearview window, along with driving there, and dispensing the groups hotel keys, it was around 4a.m. when everyone finally got to sleep. Yikes.
The next day was the official kickoff to the weeklong party. As I already mentioned, the mud was trucked in from Boryeong to the beach, to accommodate the truck loads of people, so it wasn’t just a huge free for all wallow in a giant mud pit, as I had originally pictured in my mind. The area was well thought out, most likely from there fourteen year history running the festival. There was a main stage for entertainment and music, and for the serious muddies, they had stations set up all over with different activities going on all day revolving around an idea that required all participants to maybe, perhaps, just a tad, stick a pinky toe in the mud (yeah
right).
Yeah right, welcoming you to the festival is an area that only a chubby kid making sandcastles could love. A virtual traveling carnival world of blowup castles and other inflatable contraptions did their jobs helping to get everyone lathered in the mineral infused miracle mud. The first stop was the mud buckets, or the “Mud Self Massage Zone,” where the smaller crowds went to gingerly, and even artfully, apply their mud instead of going ‘American Gladiator’ style through a mud flooded obstacle course, or the “Mud Prison,” slide down the mud slide, or chill in the mud filled kiddie pools.
Everybody from Yeoju made different arrangements to get there, but the crew all met up in the afternoon to rock some baggie style long island ice teas together. Alex, Art, and Tom took full advantage of red, yellow, blue, and green colored mud donning some serious mud art. It was wild just seeing hundreds if not thousands of people everywhere just mulling about completely head to toe full of either freshly applied mud, or the crusty, invigorating, kind.
The routine typically goes like this, you get muddy, you play some games, you get
muddier, you have some drinks, you go wash off cause you’re freezing, have some drinks to warm up and the cycle starts all over again; maybe not in that order, but you get the idea. Mud, no mud, everyone went to eat some clams for dinner- some still rocking their rejuvenating mud masks and some not. It was quite the experience, definitely more than anticipated, and lived up to the facebook hype, the newspaper hype, and deservedly gets the title of third weirdest festival on earth.
*Here’s a joke for everyone*
Who has two thumbs, and didn’t get to the Mud Festival?
This guy!
Yes, it’s true, as Cass and every other foreigner made their way to the mud, I was on perhaps the final overnight teacher’s trip of my time here in Korea. We actually weren’t too far from the festival, ironically, so Cass and I did a kind of ‘divide and conquer’ of the western side of the country.
A one o’clock departure from school on friday, the kids went hope early because of the festivities, saw the first soju bottle cracked at the makeshift table in the back of
the bus before we even hit the highway. The men and women switched seats throughout the trip until we pulled into a parking lot at the Sungoonsa Temple. We meandered around the temple grounds for a while, amidst the misty mountains, making it an otherworldly place- a stark contrast to the mud fest Cass was at.
Dinner was becoming an interesting topic of conversation at this point, I gathered from everyone that we were eating grilled eel. That soon followed by some kind of comment about, “stamina,” or, “man power.” I tried dodging these bullets until we pulled into the parking lot greeted by a statue that looked like it was stolen from the Penis Park we visited not long ago. The dirty jokes didn’t stop from there on, and you can imagine the kind of body language conversations I was involved in.
Numerous awful red wine glasses later, we headed to the first no rae bong… but this was different, it was like a personal bar complete with a dj and a disco light show. In fact, we didn’t just head to one no rae bar, we made it two different places throughout the night.
Tables were all ready set up with drinks and appetizers for us as we swamped the mic, stage, and dance floor in both places. I graced the stages of both bar with rousing renditions of O-Bla-Di, O-Blah-Da, and the Four Nonblondes.
Maybe, four hours of sleep later, the 8 a.m. knock on the door jarred us awake with a voice behind it yelling, “Sauna!” I don’t know if you remember the blog titled
Kon Bae !!! “Kon Bae” on 11/17/08, and the utter awkwardness that Korean style bathhouses is, but let’s just say when I heard that word, alarm bells and sirens went off in my head. Thankfully, four hours of sleep and a night full of cheers and singing, and I was too exhausted to care about bathing nude with all my male coworkers. Yeah, I won’t lie, it was weird, no matter what condition I was in. Grin and bear it... that's about all you can do
A soju filled breakfast with what everyone calls, “hangover soup” and we all stumbled into the bus, some better than others. During the trip home, we stopped for a clam grilling escapade on the coast, where I ate yet
more unidentified creatures. This time these little guys had some kind of antennas with what looked like eyes on the end… or that could’ve been the cumulative effects of yet another teacher’s weekend talking.
I got home Saturday night, after finishing up the remainder of my nights sleep on the bus ride home and met up with Lance to start our ‘Bar Hop Yeoju’ night. One drink at each bar we come across ranking each one on a 1 - 10 scale in order to spice things up around here. Lance and I put our years of experience together, and these are the official results of Round 1… Fox Bar and Jan=8, Icarus and Boss=7, Western Bar=6… we will publish results as the come.
Those of you who haven’t yet, please spin by the new articles I recently got published, a couple of my more interesting cultural pieces you might find interesting. The links are on the front page of the blog. Let me know what you think! Thanks all!
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Susan Schott
non-member comment
Another impressive article!
You are an incredible writer with lots of insight and detail into what is acctually going on in Korea. since I almost applied for a TESL job there last fall I have been a faithful reader. I am a sister of Cassie'client Jimmy. Last weekend in butte I was visiting with the parents of Sally Thompson who is also in Korea and I would love to hook her up with you two and your blog! It''s so good!