Ever since I arrived in Seoul, I had been told by various people (mainly from Now bar), that I had to try out the annual Mud Festival in Boryeoung, as it was 'the thing' to do whilst being here. Purely on the basis that the words 'mud' and 'festival' were used, I got quite excited that this could be Korea's answer to Glastonbury (where I am partial to a bit of mud sliding) and signed my name up for 2009's effort, 11th and 12th July. It wasn't and the only music act was Rain (which fit in well with the weather), who I'm pretty sure would have bottles of wee thrown at him if he were to ever play at Pilton farm.
We left Seoul at about 9.45 Sat morning and were instantly amazed by the planning, or lack thereof, our chosen 'company' provided. Not that we weren't expecting it, the girl that we had booked our tickets through, had been constantly Facebooking people, with increasingly bizarre messages (luckily I hadn't joined the Mudfest group, however I was a little sad that I'd missed out on all the fun of watching a woman descend into madness), and had called Faye earlier in the week to lament that she needed to 'sort out' her Korean friend who kept phoning (no one we knew was phoning her) and 'speaking crap'. Also, that if Faye didn't do this, she'd be mad and that she was 'friends with a lot of black people, innit.' Quite why she deigned to tell Faye this was beyond us, but you know, crazies do strange things.
The bus driver quickly accosted Luna, our Korean friend, and asked her where the heck they were supposed to be going, whilst getting her to translate the destination into English for the coach sign. In return we were ushered to the best coach and given free t-shirts. Score us. The bus journey went rather quickly, even though for much of it I was gasping for a wee (can I just point out again, Korean coaches do not have toilets) and we had the misfortune of sitting near possibly the most annoying, loudest Welsh person alive. She was even worse than Frank. ;o) Even lovely, sweet Amy was threatening to strangle her by the end of the 3 hour journey.
Arriving at Boryeoung we were reminded of that old American adage 'Spring Break'. This was constantly reinforced by possibly all the teachers in Korea running past screeching and chugging from beer cans. There was even a geezer with a frat tattoo, which caused our group much mirth. Not only did all the teachers in Korea seem to be at the fest, but also most of the American military too, which begs the question, who the heck was defending South Korea from the North? Kim Jong-il, sort it out mate, if your spies were worth anything you could've waged a massive attack and pretty much conquered the South, all because of Mudfest.
Our team quickly looked around for Rudi, the organiser of our coaches/hotel room and realised that a) we'd gotten a bus with the completely wrong company (but yey for free t-shirts) and b) she was as unorganised as we'd thought, being surrounded by about 5000 pissed off westerners and seemingly pointing them all to random parts of the town, saying, 'yes, your hotel is there, tell them I sent you and it'll be fine.' We finally got our chance to talk to her and were sent to a rather ok hotel called the Persian, just around the corner. On arrival we were told that we had not yet been allocated a room, as Rudi had failed to pay the deposit and they weren't sure what time we could check in. We mooched around a bit and then confronted Rudi again, who told us that the hotel were talking crap and that we would indeed have a room, within the next five minutes, or her friends would sort them out. Half an hour later, more due to Luna being a star than Rudi, we were in our room, leaving a lot of annoyed westerners in the lobby. Not sure how many got their rooms sorted, but I did hear reports of complaints from people on the Monday (that Facebook thing again) and when we passed Rudi a couple of hours later there was a policeman around her and both her and the check-in girl at the Persian were in tears - turns out Rudi's card was declined. Whoops.
Anyway, we had a hotel room, so smugly we wandered into the affray. Our main mistake was to wear flip flops, which were quickly returned to the hotel room along with cameras, money, comedy ajumma visors and other such necessities. On our return we ploughed headfirst into the midst of the fun, colouring ourselves all the colours of the muddy rainbow (there was paint pigment - pretty sure it's a carcinogenic, but still, whole lotta fun), wrestling, diving into the mud swimming pool and then rinsing it all off in the ocean, where Ben managed to lose a second pair of glasses. No worries though, I dove into the surf and found some glasses for him! They weren't his and had no lenses, but I'd like to think, in the scheme of things, that didn't really matter. More mud was involved as the afternoon wore on and, with a shivering still tonsilitis'd up Amy (we'd gone out for her birthday the Thursday before and she'd overdone it some on the beer, fags and norebang), we headed to the room for a quick change of clothes about 6ish.
Once the showers were had, we heard a knock on the door and a rather random Australian came in, asking if we'd seen his friends. We said no, but invited him in for a beer and a chat. Everyone made arrangements with him to meet up again later on in the night, but alas, that didn't happen. Randomly enough though, whilst trying to convince James of the Ruddick fame to come over for a visit via his status profile, a guy commented also that he lived in Korea. I looked at the picture, and sure enough the random Aus guy was also friends with James - turns out they travelled together about two years ago. Needless to say, Dan and I are now friends and James is looking for flights over. Ah, such a small world.
The rest of the evening passed in a blur in the local bar, California (just another ode to the western lovin' in Boryeoung). I can't remember most of it, but, randomly I woke up with a few new numbers in my phone. The next morning, I hung my head in drunken hangover shame and, after a breakfast bibimbap we very naughtily jumped on a bus to Suwon, taking with us Matti, the lovely South African and leaving about 5 people without a bus ride home. Sorry, folks! We're going to hell, but hey, least we're all together, it'll be more fun that way.
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