Summer Vacation Part 2: "Boryeong Mud Fest"

I decided to kick off my summer vacation in style, by attending the Boryeong Mud Festival.  Boryeong is a really small town on the West (Yellow) Sea. Each year it is invaded by thousands of tourists for their Mud Festival, which celebrates their town's unique mud with mystical healing powers.... or something like that. Let's be honest, it has turned into an excuse for people to roll in the mud, drink soju and play on the beach all weekend. And I took advantage of all of these things while I was there.

We went with a tour group, as that's the easiest way to get a hotel room during such an insanely busy weekend. Our bus was leaving at 7 a.m. from Seoul, so we decided to take a late bus on Friday night to Seoul and just crash at a jimjilbang.  A jimjilbang is like a bath house. You can go in, shower and bathe in various pools (ice cold, luke warm, warm, hot, scalding your skin off) and sit in the sauna. Then when you're all finished you put on these special clothes they give you that look like a prison issued uniform and go to a big room where you can socialize, watch tv, get a massage in a massage chair, or for the most part, sleep.  They're pretty cheap, so they're a good option for sleeping if you don't plan to spend much time there and don't want to splurge on the hotel.  However, they are not exactly the most comfortable place to sleep in the world. Between the hard wood floor, the not-quite darkness and the chatty ajummas, we spent four hours there and I might have slept a total of 45 minutes.

The Mud 5k

The next morning, after a short moment of drama where my debit card got eaten by an ATM (removed it with tweezers from my make-up bag... I know, I'm a genius), we headed for Boryeong.  First we went to the beach where the mud comes from to run a Mud Marathon (which was really just a 5k around the beach). It was a great time as I made some new friends and walked the whole thing at a nice leisurely pace. And we even got medals at the end! My friend Ryna actually got fourth place for the women! It turned out the real reason for this event was to get pictures of foreigners rolling in the mud for next year's brochure. One photographer actually carried the current brochure and would say "funny pose-uh" and point to a picture asking us to replicate it. Dance monkey! Dance! Marize is a ham so she posed for them. I ran away.

My mouth is closed in this picture because it's filled with mud.... not so fun.

Ryna, Marize and I in a mud obstacle course

Next we went into the town of Boryeong, where the festival is held on their main beach. They bring the mud in by the truck loads, and create mud slides, mud wrestling, mud obstacle courses, mud swimming pools...  you can wait in ridiculously long lines for the great pleasure of having mud thrown at you by some Korean lady, or you can have colorful mud painted all over your body. The nearby quickie mart was over-run by muddy people buying bottles of soju and beer, and inebriated festival-goers swayed drunkenly to the bands jamming on the beach.  You could also swim in the ocean, so long as you didn't go past your chest because the Fun Police (that's what I called them... they were probably the real police) would zip by on a jet ski and yell at you.  How could I forget? In Korea, where everything from touching a butterfly to going on a boat is considered "very dangerous", how could one possibly venture into the ocean past where they can touch??

"What?? There's sea life?? Quick, protect the beer!"

One of many amazing pictures of Amy and the ajossi.

Saturday was basically a blur of swimming in the ocean, dancing on the beach and playing in the mud. At one point I decided I had done enough mud bathing for the day and I walked back to the hotel to take a shower.  Shortly thereafter I got a call from Ryna. I love the way Ryna speaks, and I can't really put into words why. It's not just her South African accent. It's something about her word choice, or her intonation, or something, that always makes me smile a bit. And she has an uncanny way of leaving a couple of details out.  Anyway, the phone call went a little something like this:

Jenna: Hello?
Ryna: Jenna, are you at the hotel?
Jenna: Yes, why?
Ryna: We just need to make arrangements for the ambulance.
Click.

Ambulance??? Who leaves a conversation at that?

About ten minutes later an ambulance shows up at the hotel with our friend Amy in the back. Her bum knee dislocated and she was in excruciating pain.  Apparently there happened to be a Marine nearby when she injured it and he popped it back in for her.  In this tiny town we had such a limited number of resources. No pain meds, no crutches that were nearly tall enough for her height, no elevator in our hotel. I felt terrible for her. 

We got Amy to a hospital the next morning and they gave her a better wrap, but she was still in pretty bad shape. We bought her a beach chair to sit on until our bus was ready to leave, and we were collectively dreading the bus ride to Seoul, navigating the subway, and the second bus ride to Jeomchon with her leg in that state.We arrived at home in one piece, but with a combination of bad luck, missed buses and injured people I didn't hit my bed until nearly 2 a.m.  It was an eventful weekend indeed, let's leave it at that.