I had waited a whole year for what I did last weekend. I got slathered in mud at the Boryeong Mud Festival. My first year in Korea, I couldn’t go because I didn’t know anyone or how to get there, and I was too broke to go anyway. I’m not sure why I’ve been so hung up about going to the mud festival because I’m not exactly an outdoorsy type of lass. Actually, I have a total hissy over insects, which makes for a good deterrent from the outdoors. The lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) of the wilderness bring no fear to my heart, but if we’re talking about a grasshopper- FORGET IT!
Perhaps my determination to go to the mud festival springs from a childhood camp experience. I went to diabetes camp when I was 9ish years old and hated every minute of it. Like I said, I’m not outdoorsy in the first place, and I don’t like diabetes. I think that’s a fair enough opinion to have considering I’ve lived with it for the past 19 years and 1 month and it sucks like a black hole on steroids. I understand the reasoning behind diabetes camp, though. Those who run it want the kids to feel like they’re not alone with the condition, and they want to give diabetic children the opportunity to go to camp in an environment where people know what to do should one of us keel over and die for no apparent reason. Its intended purpose has always been lost on me. If anything, it makes me mad to know that more people have it and nothing can be done about it. Knowing that other people have it was never any mystery for me, and it doesn’t change anything in my own situation. If you think about it, if you lost your legs, sure it’s nice to know that other people have also lost their legs and you’re not alone, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t wish you had your own legs back.
In any case, diabetes camp was a double wammy of stuff that I don’t like. The food was terrible, I hated the BUGS, I hated the showers, and I hated the overconfident, cheery counselors that thought a few weekends of emergency diabetes care seminars was equivalent to an M.D. I thought the pool was ok until I slipped on something on the floor that prevented me from finding my footing again and I almost drowned in it. There were three lifeguards on duty, and you would have thought one of them would have come to help me, but the one was too busy being asleep because she was about 93 years old, and the other two, a young man and woman, were too busy flirting to guard any lives in the pool. Luckily my fellow campers helped me.
The other camp activity that interested me a bit was when we went swimming and kayaking in the creek. I was all for kayaking, but swimming in the creek? With all that dirt and all those bugs? Oh no. Oh, no thank you. I thought my mom would kill me if I got all muddy and dirty, as an added excuse. So, I wore some decent clothes including my good sneakers for the hike/kayak ride. What they didn’t tell me was that there was a MUD SLIDE down the hill!!!! Now that sounded like a good time. I could land in the creek at the bottom for a second or two and just get right out before all the water bugs came, right? I was so angry at myself for not wearing my ratty clothes. Most of my anxiety was about my shoes, but I was afraid of walking through the woods and getting my feet scratched up if I were wearing sandals (my parents made sure I understood from an early age that I should take good care of my feet). So I watched on in envy as the other kids slid and slopped down the hill and into the cool, brown, muddy water below, laughing the whole way down.
This was my chance to make up for that missed mud experience all those years ago. Really, how often are we in a situation where it’s socially acceptable and even encouraged to roll around in the mud and hurl it at your friends? I made tentative plans months ago to go down, and two days before the festival, they fell apart. I was really angry and stressed, but eventually found another way down to the festival along with my coworker/friend Heather. After being there for about 20 seconds, it was definitely easy to see that this is a foreigner festival. The ratio of Koreans to foreigners was probably 50/50, or maybe a few more foreigners. I expected to see a lot of foreigners since the pictures in the festival brochure were almost exclusively white people. I didn’t really mind, but I was surprised, nonetheless.
The mud was a little different from what I expected. It was gray, and very very thin; I was expecting something a little more sludgelike. Although it felt like a homogenous mixture of water and little bits of grit, it was very soft, in a way. It had a very distinct but very subtle scent to it, and it wasn’t at all bad. It dried into a lighter gray color reminiscent of concrete, and it cracked after drying on the skin. The ocean was a perfect, cool temperature, but it smelled like fish.
I couldn’t wait to get started. As we tried to decide where to begin, we wandered around checking out the beach, the mud slide, the mud crawly things, the mud painting stations, and of course, the mud prison. The first thing we did after finding a locker was go into the mud prison. If you’re too clean, you go inside and everyone throws mud at you until you look like the chocolate monster from the Candyland Board. As soon as I stepped inside, another inmate threw a bunch of mud from the floor in my face. I reciprocated the attack, and lost my sandal in the process. I bent down to get a better hold of it, and as I stood up, my right ear rang like the dickens and half the world went dark.
As I bent down, one of the “prison guards” had taken a big bucket of mud and hurled it at us inmates through the bars. All the other prisoners had ducked and covered, but I didn’t see it coming at all since I was bent down over my shoe. I had stood up at just the right time to get smacked in profile with the full wrath of the bucket. Before I even knew what had happened, Heather looked at me and said “You look like Two-face from Batman.” And I’m sure I did. The mud was absolutely dripping off of me. My right ear was ringing and I could only hear things as if I was underwater. It was fantastic.
A little while later we stumbled on some friends (including Socius’ lovely Karla) and proceeded to slather and paint mud all over each other. As we walked away from the beach, a Korean man walked by carrying his three year old child. The child stopped and gasped, wide-eyed at DeVika. DeVika looked at him and gasped right back. The child must have had a total mental breakdown because he screamed to the absolute heavens and started crying hysterically. His father put him down and tried to walk with him, but the kid was crying so hysterically that he couldn’t even walk straight or keep from falling down. I laughed harder than I should have. I feel a little bad about it, but not really.
As those around us made plans for the evening, Heather and I made plans to take a shower and get back on the tour bus. I would have liked to stay, but I could feel myself baking inside the crispy mud crust like a Stephanie pie. It would have been nice to stay, but I knew my sunburn would have gone from uncomfortable to painful and my alcohol intake would have been unhealthy. I came back home and had a blast back here hanging out with some of the new kids in Daejeon. As a final word though, make sure you get to the mud festival while you’re in Korea. It’s great, even if you don’t have minor childhood trauma to overcome.
