Mud Fest

The Boryeong Mud Festival is an annual festival which takes place during the summer in Boryeong, South Korea. The first Mud Festival was staged in 1998 and, by 2006, the festival attracted 1.5 million visitors to Boryeong.
The mud is dug up near Boryeong, trucked to the Daecheon beach area, and dumped at a 'Mud Experience Land'.The mud is considered rich in minerals and used to manufacture cosmetics.
Some of the final weekend participants are foreign tourists, and especially American GIs, but most of the participants during the week are Koreans, attracted by clever marketing by the town. The town fathers and mothers discovered that the mud is more lucrative as a tourist attraction than using the muddy fields for agriculture. The economy generated from the festival supports the many hotels and restaurants along the waterway and several blocks inland.Thanks wikipedia...But anyway, this is where I spent my weekend. I got on a train literally as soon as I was able to leave on Friday. This train had a club, bar and 노래방 (karoke) on it. AMAZING!!! Once we reached our destination (3hours) we went to the beach for a bit and then to eat seafood. The amount of shellfish that is available was crazy. You paid like 20,000won and would get all you can eat shellfish.

The next day we got up and went to breakfast. After that we changed into out suits and headed to the beach and the mud. There were a couple of different ways to get muddy: tubs of mud that you painted mud on yourself, mud bath, mud jail and my favorite the mudslide. We played in the mud for hours then we washed off in the sea. It started raining around 4 and that put an early end to the fun we were having outside.

The next day (Sunday) we really wanted to go back to the beach and hang out but due to the storm and riptides we weren't able to. They weren't allowing anyone in the water but I honestly didn't want to be in the water to cold and scary. Instead we ordered pizza and stayed in a bar all day. Finally our train left for home and we came back home tired and muddy. Overall it was a good weekend!