"I'm Not As Dirty As You Think"

This was the slogan on quite a few of the t-shirts that I saw at the Boryeong Mud Festival that I went to this past weekend. It's an annual festival that runs for two weekends each summer at Daecheon Beach, which is apparently a sleepy little town a few hours south of Seoul for the other 50 weeks out of the year. 

I went with Adventure Korea, which basically meant that I had paid ahead for a coach bus there and back from the Express Bus Terminal, and lodging for the night. This particular trip didn't have meals included. We had to be at the EB terminal at 8am, which is an hour metro ride and a 20 minute bus ride away from me, which meant being at the bus station at 6am. Oddly enough, when my alarm rang at 5am, I got up without hitting the snooze button once. Why is it that I can't do that on the weekdays? Anyway, we got there a few minutes early, hoping to find a coffee shop or something open at the bus terminal. Apparently nothing at that stop is open until 10am, even the coffee shop whose doors were open, lights were on, and the music was playing at 8:05. So I had to settle for some horrible kimbop (rice rolled in seaweed) from a street vendor, which I ended up giving to Cherita because it had some sort of pickled radish in the middle of it that was just gross. 

The bus ride was fine - there were three chartered buses coming from the EB terminal, so of course we left about half an hour late. I suppose that's to be expected when you have over a hundred 20-somethings all having to get up at dawn. They told us on the bus that we were to check into the hotel once we got there, and that at 1:30 we needed to be back at the hotel and hosed off so we could get back on the bus to do the extreme sports. Our group (James, Cherita and I) decided we'd rather stay where we were and meet up with our partner teachers, who were only able to come down for a  few hours the first day. And since our room, as well as most of the rooms on the second floor, were still occupied, we left our bags at the front with one of the 'tour guides' and headed off to get lunch.

We met up with our partner teachers, Ally, Gina, and Sylvia, and decided to eat at a seafood place right on the beach. We got what would be the equivalent of a shellfish platter. There are large tanks outside all the seafood places with every kind of different seafood, live, that you can think of. They lit a charcoal in the pit in the middle of the table, put a grill over it, and then proceeded to cover it in live mussels, conch, clams, shrimp, and a few other shell creatures that I couldn't name. When the shells popped open, they were done, and we ate them right out of the shells - with chopsticks of course. I would have taken pictures of this amazing meal, but my batteries had died on the bus, and I couldn't find the extras that I'd brought with me just in case. At one point, the shells started exploding, and little bits of hot shell were being propelled at our faces. I'm guessing this is why we were all given aprons. Every time we would clear off the grill, or start to get close, they would bring us even more. After a while, we had to tell them to stop because we were all getting full. 

After lunch, the Korean teachers went off on their own while we went to go put our bags into our hotel room. Imagine my surprise when I was greeted with a bare floor, a tv, and a tiny dresser with a pile of blankets and pillows on it. There were no beds. I'm pretty sure there's not a single hotel in America that could get away with having a hotel with no beds, but apparently this is a standard cheap hotel in Korea. Talk about paying for just the roof over your head. 

So then we headed out for the mud! The few pictures that I do have from the first day are from James' camera. He put it in a ziploc bag to keep it from getting mud on it, so the pictures are a bit fuzzy, but you still get the idea.

We got ourselves covered in the Mud Tub, and then James and Kate and I went for a few rounds of mud wrestling, which looked something like this, only with about twice as many people:

We pretty much spent the rest of the day bouncing between playing around in the mud, and washing off in the ocean, then getting muddy again. We had dinner at a golbi place since we weren't in the mood for anymore seafood, and spent the evening on the beach drinking, eating, people watching, and waiting for the fireworks. We were told the fireworks would be around 10pm, so we waited until 10:45 and decided to head back to the rooms since we were exhausted. And of course, they started right after we had left our perfect spot on the beach. By this point I had bought some batteries for my camera since the extras I brought that I found in my bag were, of course, dead as well. 

As soon as the fireworks were over, we headed off to bed. We had to be checked out of our room by 11, so we got up a little earlier than we would have liked - 8am. So we went to get brunch at Lotteria, the Korean version of McDonalds, and took a few pictures while we were out.

 

The Mud Prison, one of the easier ways to get covered

We went and got muddy on the beach for a few hours, did a few more bouts of mud wrestling, and then rinsed off so we could pack up our room and put our things on the bus. After making sure we had everything out, we headed out again for more muddiness.

Cherita and me. She didn't really want to get muddy the second day.

Kate and me. We met her outside the hotel and she hung around with us most of the weekend

Cherita, James and me. The three English teachers at EWAS

We had to be back on the bus by 3:50 (of course we didn't leave until almost 4:30), so we rinsed off outside and I changed in one of the public restrooms near the bus parking lot. It's the first time I've been in a squatting bathroom. No toilet, just a porcelin hole in the ground that flushes. It makes it a bit easier to change when there isn't a toilet taking up most of the stall, but I was mortified at the prospect that I might end up dropping my clean clothes on the floor. I really hope I don't have to use one of those again, but that's all they have in the subway stations. So we got on the bus and made it home just fine. I'm a bit sunburned, but mostly just sore from the wrestling and sleeping on the floor. I can't wait to go back next year. :)

Strange and Wonderful Things

I made a few discoveries today that I have to share. The first goes under my mental list of "awesome" things here that don't exist back home.
I'm usually bad with money, but I'm actually very good about keeping up with my check book. I'm not one of those people that will stand at the checkout and enter the total into my book, but I will go home, sort through all my receipts each night, and check what's in my checkbook against what's cleared on my account online. So after having to switch to a different bank, KB, because the first bank, ShinHan, wouldn't give me a check card, only an ATM card (which really defeats the purpose of having an account, don't you think?), I stopped by the ATM to check my balance since I got paid today. As I'm carefully looking through the menu options, I notice an 'Update Passbook' button. And I look a little more closely at the ATM, and notice that not only is there a place for cash, for your card, and for the receipt, but a place to enter your passbook, which is like a checkbook, but has your account information printed on it. So I hit the button, insert my passbook, and without even inserting my card, the ATM scans my passbook, determines what's already been printed and where, and then prints all of the transactions on my account since the last entry! How cool is that?!? Imagine being able to go to a Bank of America ATM, inserting your checkbook, and having the bank print all your missing entries. It's almost like a portable quickbooks or something.
Completely unrelated, but also wonderful, I found a tiny little shop in the metro station that sells body jewelry. They also do piercings, but it can't be sanitary. Imagine getting pierced in the subway station... uck. Anyway, they have a bunch of earrings that are my size (they go by millimeters here and not gauges), so if I loose mine, I know where to get replacements.

So tomorrow is Friday, and then I have to be at the metro station at 5am on Saturday. We're going with Adventure Korea to the Mud Festival. We're taking a chartered bus from the express bus station to Boreyung, where I'm going to spend the weekend at the Mud Festival. I'm really looking forward to it, and if I can keep my camera from getting too muddy, I'll post pictures next week.

Edit: I forgot to write about the Strange Things I encountered as well. It was in my lunch. Or to be more exact, it was my lunch. What was it you ask? Minnows. You know those little tiny fish that swim in shallow water? Yeah, those. They're dried, and caramelized. In soy sauce. I ate them in my rice. Other than the obvious squeemishness I encountered while eating little dried fish with their eyes still intact, they're actually not that bad on rice. Much better than the sponge-like substance that was in my soup today. When I say sponge, it was like they cut up a dish sponge, baked it in mushroom water, and then handed it to me in a bowl. Lovely.