Clear Skies and Muddy Waters

I often complain, both on this blog and in person, about the murky skies in Korea. It's rare to have a day where the sky doesn't flow into a muted gray horizon that blurs the landscape and becomes indistinguishable from any nearby clouds. This Saturday however was so suddenly and amazingly clear, that even the morning cloud cover was the brightest, sunniest day there had been here in months.


The timing of it couldn't have been better, as it happened the same day as our trip to the Boryeong Mud Festival, a yearly festival where people flock to the beach and cover themselves with mud that's meant to cleanse the body and restore good health. Or something like that, I shouldn't pretend to know too much about the history and significance of it, since I was merely a part of the foreigner crowd who came in to get muddy, have some drinks and enjoy the beach. And wow, what a great day it was!


Everything about this day was shaping up nicely. Two of the girls in town had booked us not only a place to stay but a big bus to get there. Not having to worry about travel was awesome, and we rolled into Boryeong at noon singing songs, feeling
refreshed and ready for a good time. The place we were staying at wasn't amazing, but it did the job, had a BBQ we could use, and was right on the beach (though a 15 minute walk from the major crowds).

There are nearly as many foreigners who come to the festival as Koreans, and while I've never been to Thailand, I was told the atmosphere was pretty similar - piles of
people from all over the world, mostly between 18 and 30, walking around half naked, drinking in the streets and relaxing on the beach. Except here every other person was covered head-to-toe in mud. Some people had it on so thick I had trouble recognizing them as people if they weren't moving. There were mud-wrestling pits, big slides to ride down, wading pools full of mud, buckets of it sitting around with brushes to slap it on with, as well as heaps of other things not-so-mud-related.
Concert stages, massage tents, food vendors, nights clubs and other touristy things were piled up all around the beach, and it was hard to really figure out what was supposed to be going on as the main attraction sometimes.

I got down and dirty in the mud a couple of times, though once the sun dried me out, I turned into a giant pile of dust and grit, which wasn't quite so pleasant. Fortunately the ocean was always right there and when you got too gross you could plunge in and clean off (though really, with the tens of thousands of people on the beach, I don't think the water was much cleaner than the mud).



The night carried on as many other long nights away from home often do - staying up late, meeting interesting characters, singing songs around a fire (this time on the beach) and ordering way too much pizza at am. There wasn't much in the way of sleep to be had, with 16 of us lying on the floor together, but I can't begin to describe how amazing it was the next day, watching the thousands of travelers who came to town crawling and scrambling to the bus or train station, while we casually had breakfast and let our bus come to us. The weather even stayed sunny right up until we reached Mokpo, hinting that maybe the good times had in Boryeong had been divinely preordained.

Only two more weeks (just less actually) before it's back to Canada for a month. I'm looking forward to getting away for a while, however I'm having a bit of a good run on teaching these days, so I'm not counting down the days like I thought I'd be. Plus, it's such a pain trying to squeeze every possible thing out of the time at home, I'm inevitably going to upset people (including myself) with not being able to do certain things or doing things that I don't want to do. Meh, it'll still be a great time. Thanks for reading!