mud festival stories

The pictures below are in no kind of order at all, because I attached them really quickly to get them up before my internet was supposed to go down for two days for construction. The internet did go down briefly, but they didn't do the construction they were supposed to do, and now I've tiptoed around it for most of a week only to find out that on this continent, you should never trust computer people to do what they tell you they'll do in their very clear instructions posted on every flat surface available in the building. Asia has a couple of times surprised me with how backwards it actually is, and this is one of them. The fact that there is no way to dry your hands in 90 percent of the bathrooms here also strikes me that way. Anyway.

So I went to the Boryeong Mud Festival last weekend, and it was a hoot. We'll see how well I can contain my verbosity. I'd like to keep my stories here a little bit shorter becuase a lot of stuff happened this week that I'd like to post about tonight. I find that I really don't have the time I'd like to have in the middle of the week to post things; two classes keep me a lot busier than I thought they would.

So the mud festival was in Boryeong, hence its name, which is a fairly small city. It's right on the coast, and the muddy part of the festival backed right up to the beach, with other things like makeshift restaurants and karaoke tents extending further into town. They bring in tons and tons of mud from who-knows-where, and thousands of people attend to cover themselves in it. They say it's good for the skin; you can buy mud beauty products there, but I never found a place to shop for them. Many of the older folks there covered their faces in mud and nothing else, lolling around in the sun letting the mud do whatever it's meant to do to your skin. Well, I say they lolled in the sun; actually, the first day they just lolled in the lack of rain, and the second day it was pouring so I didn't go to the beach to see if they were lolling or not. The international affairs senior coordinator, Mrs. Kim, said that this mud festival is the most foreigners she's ever seen in one place in this country, bar none. There were tons of Americans around. I think a lot of them must have come from military bases here. It was weird to see non-Asian people walking around and hear English spoken by people outside our little group.

I had thought there would be like a big pit of mud or something that you were supposed to roll around in, but actually there were stations with bowls of mud that you painted on with paintbrushes or just scooped on with your hands. I did in fact get very muddy, if you are skeptical about that because there's no muddy Sarah picture up. There is a picture of me on Mrs. Kim's camera that I can put up when she emails it to me, which she hasn't yet, but alas it does not well depict my muddy state. Our cameras were locked up for safety on the beach, so I wanted to put off getting a picture until nearly time to leave to minimize out-of-locker time for the cameras. So we got really muddy, then we went in the ocean for a while, then we got really muddy again and played around some in the mud, then we went in the ocean for a big long time and played in the big waves, and then I wanted to get muddy again for a picture, rinse off quickly, and leave on time. Alas, what I found when I went to muddy myself for the third time was that they ration the mud they've brought in, making sure there's enough to go the whole festival, and that particular hour was one in which all the mud was used or dried up and they weren't putting any more out for a while. So I did my best to get really dirty with the muddy water that was sitting around plentifully, and that is what I could do. We ended up taking the picture with Mrs. Kim's camera instead of mine just to make life easier. The other pictures of the festival here were taken mostly before my playing in the mud started.

I usually do not like beaches that much because of the sunburn potential, but I had a great time with this. Perhaps it hearkened back to that day at the old Beech Drive house when me and James played and played in the rain and got incredibly muddy and I alas,was wearing pink. It was soon after that day that the "no pink or white rolling down hills" rule came. Sure was fun, though I recall feeling vaguely guilty watching mom with that outfit in the laundry room. I think that with things like playing on the beach, I often have trouble having fun because I feel like there really ought to be something useful I ought to be doing instead of frivolous relaxation, like catching up on my homework or practicing. With this group, though, I landed in the middle of forty people who have no such urge to be useful and were willing to drag me into the fun, and so I did enjoy it. We threw mud at each other and jumped over waves and generally were not useful at all for several hours, and it was great. I was, however, ready to be done when it was time to go, and when the weather the next day was nasty, I was not terribly disappointed not to go back to the beach. I had a long lunch with the staff and a few other students instead, and we had a nice warm dry pleasant time.

Also on the second day, during the rain, we visited the Coal Museum nearby, which was a neat museum about the history of coal mining in Korea. It would have been a lot more interesting if they'd captioned their exhibits in English, but just seeing their things was neat, and they had a few things I could read. They had a lot of mining artifacts and photographs, and some displays modelling what miners would have looked like on the job. The museum is built on an old mining site, and it had an elevator you could ride down into an old mining tunnel. It was of course all fixed up with walls and stuff so that we didn't breathe coal or anything and couldn't really see what the tunnel had looked like in the old days, but it was neat to be down there. My personal favorite was the archeological exhibit they had, with a bunch of fossils, some of which they'd found while mining (apparently, since it they were imprinted in pieces of coal, but of course I couldn't read most of the captions) and some of which Samsung had purchased to display there. Samsung owns the world here. Boryeong I think was a port town rather than a mining town; this was in a mining town a few miles away whose name I did not catch. The mountains and the locals' living conditions reminded me of rural Appalachia, though they had little places with Korean tile roofs instead of trailers. It was a very poor area in a beautiful setting.

Side note about Boryeong's being a port town: at lunch on the second day of the festival, I almost followed good sense and ordered a seafood dish since we were on the coast. However, the restaurant at which we ate offered a pork chop, and I just couldn't resist it. I didn't know I missed pork chops till faced with the chance to eat one. What I really miss is sandwiches. One of the first things I'm doing when I get home is heading to Atlanta Bread Co. for a chicken pesto panini.

Pictures. First is me in front of a mud wrestling pit. These were pretty wild, so I did not try it for fear I would return as Flat Sarah. They had all kinds of inflatable mud activities, including an obstacle course I ran and the mud slide you see in the last picture, which I rode. The mud slide was big fun; it went very very fast, and I couldn't control my path of travel, so I actually ended up flipping over a few times and sliding into the path of Connie, the German girl I slid with (you went in pairs). I don't have a picture of Connie for you, but I like her very much and ran around with her for much of the festival.

After the mud wrestling pit is a view of the mountains outside the coal museum with clouds sitting on them. It reminded me of home and made me feel happy. I think I'm a lot happier here than I would be if I was studying abroad in a flat country, like exotic Iowa.

Then there are two more pictures of festival festivities. There's the crowded beach, where you can see some of the waves we jumped around in crashing into the shore. This doesn't really show how big they got; they grew enormous as the tide started coming in. I have not figured out how so many people managed to body surf in those waves while still holding their beer in hand, but they made it. I avoided those people. Then is the big concert that was going on on the beach kind of continuously. While we were there, they played exclusively American music, which struck me as incongruous for a national cultural event, but the crowd liked it well.

After that is a fossil of what has got to be the largest snail ever, from the coal museum. I really wished I could have read about this one. This is one of Samsung's purchases, not something they found in their mountain, but I thought it was just ridiculously cool and just had to share it with you. The case it's in is several inches wider than me, squared, and it filled the thing.

Beside the snail are Delina, Michelle, and Olivia, from left to right. Delina is from Canada. She did not spend the night for the second day of the festival, but she hung out in our room while we cleaned up post-mud and pre-supper. Michelle and Olivia were my roommates for the night. Michelle is a full ethnic Korean who lives in California. I believe she was born in the states, in D.C., and has moved around a bit in the US but has never lived in Korea before. Olivia is Chinese, from a town in eastern China that is fairly close to the border with North Korea.
I sat next to her on the bus to the festival and she asked me about what we eat in America, which was sort of a funny conversation. I mentioned pasta, and found that I could not for the life of me explain what it was. They either don't eat pasta at all in China, or they eat little of it and it has some Chinese name that I couldn't clue in for her to translate. She had also never heard of turkey, so I delivered to her a very entertaining description of an enormous ugly bird with a neck thing like this (motioning) and a tail that goes like this (motioning) and wings (waving arms) that don't fly. She was just fascinated, and has resolved that she must try this turkey one day.

Arch over the street on the way to the festival. No big story there, just more festival.

Finally, two pictures that cover the entire area of the room I stayed the night in while festivaling. Our rooms were upstairs in a lab building of the Ajou Motor College, which seems to be a technical community college of some sort that is affiliated with Ajou University. I think students stay in these rooms full-time during the semester, though I had a little trouble believing it. You'll note that in the full area of the room, there, there are no beds. Instead, there are a mat, a blanket, and a couple of pillows folded up in one corner. You sleep in a room like this by unfolding the mat and sleeping on it under the blanket, snugged up on the slightly less than double-sized mat with both your roommates in tow, no sheets necessary. The lack of sheets is nothing new from my experience with the bedding I received at the dorm and the hostel we stayed in the first weekend, but walking into the room and not seeing beds was a piece of culture shock. The mat was certainly as comfortable as the not-much-mattress that I sleep on every night in this room, so it really turned out fine for comfort, but it was a weird thing to walk in and have to figure out where the sleeping quarters were hidden. There's also no closet in this room, which was fine for our weekend but would be less than desirable day-to-day full time. There are a few lockers in a corner and two big bars across one wall, which you can't see too well because of my effort to get the entirely empty floor apparent. The skinny desks were maybe the least desirable part of the room. A desktop pc would never fit on those things, and they didn't look strong enough to support me if I fell asleep over homework there. Normally I might do my homework in bed, but... :)