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Korea is fully into its dreadful rainy season and we've seen more than a week of near-ceaseless downpour. It only seemed right to make the West Coast trek to Daecheon beach, the place where torrent and earth kiss and make babies. The Boryeong Mud Festival (in its ninth annual incarnation) is a well-touted event at which people gather to soak their bodies in grey silt and get hammered in the surf. Everyone's invited, especially foreigners. We are foreigners - we like drinking Cass beer out of filthy sand-encrusted bottles as much as anybody - and we went.

I had imagined that a mud festival would be an enormous expanse of muddy plains full of frolicking idiots, like those grainy videos of Woodstock. This particular mud festival, however, was more carefully administered. The mud was not found where one might expect, like say on the ground, but rather distributed in large jugs that were immediately snatched by American military jarheads who brushed it all over their Korean girlfriends' breasts. Mud wrestling took place in a large inflatable romper room. The mud slide was also inflatable. The festival itself seemed rather inflatable, but nonetheless joyous and a good excuse to litter the ocean with crushed beer cans. And if you wanted a souvenir, you could buy mud. It's therapeutic!

A tenuous deal was struck somewhere in nature's strange balance and the weather held. The afternoon pressed on, the tide rushed in and the crowds pushed back. Mud caked flesh and built an army of fully-poseable granite action figures. Moving statues played soccer, football, frisbee, molestation games. Everyone was a pleasing shade of grey - you couldn't tell who was white or black, Korean or a dinosaur. It was the best anti-racism initiative of all time. Mud was in our eyes and down my pants and the ocean was the saltiest water I've ever tasted. All around us, waves thirstily licked the grey off so we could revert to familiar systems of beauty and discrimination.

At dinner, a drunken Korean man kissed me on the lips. Three times. Gah. And then I had to save him from stumbling into oncoming traffic. How fair is that?

Pretty fair I guess, because we ate all his friends' food and drank all their soju and told them that we would be BEST FRIENDS FOREVER about a billion times (the next morning we hardly looked at each other). But still, having men kiss you is pretty freaky shit.

Later that night, we spun poi on the beach and I hit myself in the balls with a flaming cylinder of fire. I am getting better but will soon be charred and impotent from trying. Belinda and Mike gathered a crowd of awed onlookers (poi firespinners are native to Thailand, not Korea) with feats of wild dexterity and daring-do. Slowly the crowd became the show and people stepped forward to try for themselves. Every wielder of the poi was burnt handily, but good times were had and we all learnt a few things about safety and not mangling your face with flaming gasoline.

A roll of toilet paper makes an excellent portable beach fire. Firework shows light up the sky prettily and help you find your cigarette lighter.

And sometimes (not always, but sometimes), if your friends are flipping around in the sand a short bald effeminate man will come over and say, "Oh no no no... that is not how you do a cartwheel," and then proceed to teach them how to do front handstands and back-arch walkovers. He will be a semi-professional coach, very encouraging, and regale the world with stories about how he taught football players to do triple backflips, so of course he can teach two girls how to do a handstand if only they'll remember to "look through their window." The whole thing will be very surreal, especially with people constantly tripping over buoy rope and falling on their faces in the background.

Chad will get ripping drunk and run into the sea, searching for an elusive Balls Mantis. Balls Mantis is everywhere, he is a catalyst for pain and togetherness and gigantic balloons and extra spicy food. Balls Mantis knows your mom, but you can never find him in a crowd.

The next day it rained. I got mud in my eye and ate a snail. Snails die very gracelessly, retreating into their shell in a futile attempt to escape the heat of the grill. Then they pop and their life runs out their shell and falls, sizzling, into the coals below. Their corpse tastes like rubber dipped in a whale's vagina.

I love the beach, but let's go home now.

[Korea] [Boryeong Mud Festival] [Daecheon Beach]

Posted by Chris at 08:40 AM >> Commentations (5)