Belated Mud Fest entry

Way back in mid June I attended the Boryeong Mud Festival, which celebrates the soft clay there that is supposed to be healthy to bath in. Now the festival (previously mentioned just after the event actually occurred in this post) is an excuse to pour mud on oneself and others and have a huge party. All of my friends and I went and had a fantastic time. We met up way across town and waited for a bus so that our tour group could take us to the coast. [Notes: I am going to use this post to introduce you to my friends here since I don't think I've done that before. The pictures are almost all from Madeline 'Mad Dog' Stobbe, though a few were taken by Scott or Thomas or stolen from the internet.]

Thomas here takes one of many pictures of himself, with Will and Alanna in the background. Thomas worked at my company's other school in Daejeon, along with Jeff, Mad, Laura, and Renee.

There were mud-covered inflatible slides, mud wrestling, and other games, but the lines for these were absurdly long so I did not partake. The town was absolutely packed with people. The tour group that we bused down with themselves brought about 2000 people, and they weren't even the only tour group. The main stretch of beach had a large stage and an area where one could cover oneself with mud.

The mascots of the event were a Korean couple covered in mud, which had an unfortunate (surely accidental) resemblance to people in blackface.

Scott [far left] gets muddy in a pool of mud, and Jeff [center] is just about to take the plunge.

Colin and Scott pose beneath rows of flags of various countries. I know them from the Korean class we all used to go to before I got lazy and quit. Scott is one of the most relaxed, laid back, and generally awesome to be around people I've met here. Colin is also a lot of fun and has one of the best stories I have ever heard about Korea (or maybe anywhere). One day he was told by his co-teacher that some repairs or maintenance of some sort would take place at his apartment and not to be there until a certain time. He got there about half an hour early to drop off his motorcycle and decided to see if the work happened to be done early. What he found was his doorway bricked shut. As in, Cask of Amantillado brick and mortar sealed shut, and none of us can even imagine any reason why this could in any way be useful for anything. As he stood there dumbfounded a Korean man came up, frantically apologized and told him in Korean to wait ten minutes. Colin went away for a little while and when he came back his apartment was back to normal.

Jeff, Alanna, and Lindsay, newly muddy.

Here [from right to left] Laura, Lindsay, Alanna, and I stood in a cage and had mud thrown at us. I'm really not sure what the point of it was, since it didn't get us all that muddy. I suppose it was supposed to be a photo op, but there seem to be better ideas for that.

Here will demonstrates that all of us, when we have just dunked our heads in the wet mud, look like Martin Sheen at the end of Apocalypse Now. Renee and Laura are also pictured (Renee stayed by far the cleanest of any of us).

There was also colored mud, so while most people were the gray of the most prevalent mud we say the occasional red, yellow, green, or blue person walking around. We got some colored mud and drew on ourselves and each other. Scott had a Canadian flag on his chest and a heart and 'Mom' on his bicep.

  [From left to Right: Jeff, Lauren, Mad, Laura, Lindsay, me, and Renee in the background]

[The same people as before, but now Alanna is in the back and Will is partly in the picture on the right. Lauren, Lindsay, Will, and I all work at the same branch of ECC, whereas Mad, Jeff, Thomas, Laura, and Renee work at the other branch in Daejeon. Or rather, they did all work there. Thomas and Lindsay went back to Newfoundland, Canada. Lauren is back in Colorado (we grew up about thirty miles apart but never met in the US), and Mad and Jeff are making me jealous with their trip across Southeast Asia.]

We washed off in the ocean and cleaned up at our Minbak, a private home converted into a place for sleeping, usually with pads on the floor, and in this case with people absolutely filling the floorspace.

We went to dinner near our minbak, across the street from five elephants.

Here's everyone sans mud: above are Will, me, Scott, and Laura; below are Alanna, Lindsay, Jeff, and Lauren.
[Judging from the hand gesture and the results of the weekend, I'm going to claim Will is saying to Alanna 'you should date this guy'.]

After dinner we went to the main stage to wait for the performances to begin. At dark there was a fun and impressive fireworks display from a boat out in the ocean. After that some pretty major Korean bands played despite the fact that it had started to rain. We danced on the sand to lyrics we couldn't understand from several different performers, including Girl's Generation, the flavor of the month here that is the female equivalent of a boy band (corporately constructed bands meant for mass consumption).

Girl's Generation

Mad and Jeff were smart enough to bring ponchos from Canada. All convenience stores in the town were sold out of ponchos pretty much instantly.

This is Jeff's default expression.

Thomas found some plastic line and made pom-poms.

We foreigners weren't the only ones to dance like lunatics in the rain.

As I said, default expression.

Lindsay makes a friend.

I wonder if I looked this ridiculous the whole time I was dancing. Thomas, on the other hand, dances quite well.
After the dancing I got together with Alanna, a Canadian history and medieval studies major my age who also teaches English in Daejeon. We have been euphorically dating since then. In the morning I made scrambled eggs for the twenty or so people in our group. The rain had lost some of its charm by this point, so we spent our time talking in our Minbak and in a third floor cafe with glass walls that overlooked the festivities.

Note the hose dumping liquid mud into the mud bath above.

It was windy as well as rainy.
We all got matching extra large shirts from our tour group.

Some people were feeling the effects of last night more than others, but we all appreciated the warm dry place to view the activities below.