Hi everyone,
This picture is the only one I could find of myself with some mud on me so take it for what it is. Most of us were playing it safe and kept our cameras out of the mud. Anyways, by now, most of you have seen the pictures that have circulated in the newspapers and over the Internet of the festival. Needless to say there was a lot of mud and there's no chance the sea was clean after last weekend. I'm not so sure about the health benefits of the mud, all I know is that the mud obstacle course was definitely a good time.
We left Seoul early on Saturday morning to get down to the Mudfest and it rained the entire way down and for most of the afternoon. But, once you're covered in mud, a little rain doesn't really matter, right? After dropping our things off at our room (pension for Europeans) and grabbing some lunch, we made our way into the mud festival. On one side of the festival they had different areas for self-massaging mud, a mud obstacle course, a human tug-o-war, mud wrestling pools, and mudslides. They also had a mud color painting area where you could paint your body with different colored muds. In addition, there was also a stage closer to the beach and there were a few different acts playing throughout the afternoon. Past the sand sculptures on the other side of the festival was the mud fighting area, which was exactly what it sounds like. After a few hours in the mud, we made our way down to the beach to wash off and headed back to our place for a nice nap. For dinner, given that we were by the beach, naturally we had our traditional clam feast complemented with some crab and bean sprout soup, which was delicious. By dinnertime the rain had subsided and the weather was pretty pleasant so we wandered through the festival to the main stage, where some K-pop (Super Junior, I think) act was performing. They also had a pretty decent fireworks show going on over the sea. For the rest of Saturday night we cruised up and down the boardwalk before ending the night with 노래방 (noraebang).
Some of our group crashed earlier in the evening on Saturday night and were up early on Sunday morning thanks to the blazing sun, which they were all too happy to share with the rest of us when they got back from the beach. Sunday was great, the sun was scorching, but it was a good beach day. Here are some pics:
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| The beach on a nice, sunny day. |
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| I couldn't resist, could I? |
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| Some sort of sculptures along the beach. |
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So, we sprawled out on the beach, enjoyed the ocean, soaked up some rays (and then some) and left Boryeong in the afternoon heading north back towards Seoul. Lucky for me, the train stops at Suwon Station, so I get dropped off right at home. This week was the first week of summer camp and it's going fine for the most part. I've also started Korean classes in the afternoon and those are going well too. The first day was really basic stuff, but we've ramped up our grammar and sentence formation, which has been pretty helpful. Not quite sure what's on tap for this weekend, it's the All-Star break for the Korean Baseball Association, so no baseball games. There's an interesting exhibit going on at the National Science Museum near Suwon, which I'll probably go check out. Otherwise, we'll play it by ear and conserve energy (and money) for next weekend. That's all from this end, here are this week's links.
What I'm listening to: "Tracy Jacks" by Blur
