The Boryeong Mud Festival (Mudfest) is an annual festival held on Daecheon (대천) Beach on the West Coast of Korea. For a weekend, the entire beachtown is invaded by 외국인 (foreigners) who go there for 2 days of dirty (literally) debauchery on the beach. It was really, really rainy this year, which wasn’t that bad because it only added to the muddiness, but got kind of annoying on Sunday, and most of everybody left early Sunday morning. Our bus didn’t leave until nigh on 7PM, so you can imagine the fun Sunday we had. It was kind of a blur of a weekend, but it was awesome and I’m glad I got to experience it. Here are some pictures. (These are from July…i’m catching up!)

Welcome to Mudfest

The beach in the morning

At this point I had my camera in a plastic bag for about 5 minutes...

Yeahhhh

Mudwrastlin'

I got a little rowdy for a bit

Mudslide (get it?!!! BECAUSE IT'S SLIDE WITH MUD ON IT BUT ALSO A NATURAL DISASTER LOLOLL)

awwwww

Sunset on the coast.

There was a fireworks show that night. It was pretty spectacular.

Awesome.

Oh and there were elephants.

The cabby liked my beard.

Earlier I mentioned I left town for a few days on a weekend because my city was shutting down my water.  Interesting sidenote: Its debatable whether or not my water was actually turned off or not. I live right across from a hospital and on Saturday morning/Sunday evening when it was still supposed to be shut off, my water was still running, so maybe it left it on. Dunno. Regardless, I ended up going down to my favorite beach town in Korea, Busan again with my buddy Casey. We were supposed to go with a couple other dudes, but they had a bit too much soju the night prior, so it was a solo man-date. Turned out to be a pretty quiet trip, just hung out;  Casey didn’t feel well Sunday morning so he went home early, I hung out on the beach by myself and headed home later in the day. Here are some pics from that trip.

Wow sorry guys I haven’t been updating at all lately. Going to be revamping/redesigning the site here soon I think to make it a bit easier…or maybe i’ll just change a few minor things. Point being, I hopped on tonight to try and update/catch up a few posts and realized I didn’t post anything about the funeral of Roh Moo-hyun, South Koreas former president who committed suicide by throwing himself down a hill. Badass, I know. You can read more about him here. I’m just here to post pics of the day. This was at the end of May; sorry sorry sorry (rubs hands and sings) for the delay.

Before you go chastising me for not paying my water bill, however, you should know that its not just me…its everybody. Literally thousands of people are going without running water for 48 hours, from 10 PM tonight (Friday) until 10 PM Sunday night. They’ve apparently had signs up all around the area I live in (Yeonsugu…Google it, i made the wiki page :)) for over a week, possibly more now, but of course, not many of us expats speak Korean, therefore we don’t “read every random little sign that i see posted in the elevator or by my mailbox” or “feel we have to follow the social norms of our host country” or “not pass out on the subway”. What do you want, a contract in blood!?

Speaking of passing out on subways, my friend Nicole was in the elevator of her building a few days ago with a Korean couple the other day who spoke English who informed her of the situation. She proceeded to inform us, and we proceeded to wonder what in the hell Korea is thinking. Apparently it’s to repair some pipes, which, fine, i’m sure this sort of thing happens all over the world sometimes, but 48 hours? I live across from a hospital, I’d love to see how that will work. But, then again, my water also hasn’t stopped running yet. On the same note, I’m not exactly keeping my shower running to find out when or if it will, despite how much I enjoy killing mosquitoes i catch with the scalding hot water that comes out of my faucet.

So, me and a couple dudes decided to peace out of Yeonsu for the weekend and head back down to Busan tomorrow morning, because its nicer out now than it was a couple weeks ago, and I didn’t really have any better plans anyways. Honestly, what I would have probably spent out drinking or shopping would be greater than what the 3 hour train ride there and back would have cost me anyways. So…cheers to Korean logic! (Or lack thereof)

K, so the week we were supposed to “self quarantine” ourselves, I obviously didn’t, mostly because I had been planning this trip to the south of Korea for a couple weeks already. I didn’t know that much about it at the time, other than that I heard it was really nice and its on the coast/has a beach, and i was sold on that. I went with one coworker and met up with an old rugby buddy on the train, and some other people who were friends of friends. Here are some pics from that trip:

All in all, it was a pretty fantastic trip. I’m very much looking forward to returning–and soon. If you ever visit South Korea, this is the #2 place to visit after Seoul imo.