Mud Festival!!!

This last weekend I went to the much-anticipated Mud Festival in Boryeong, which is about 2.5 hours south of Seoul. Unfortunately, we couldn't get early train tickets, so we didn't get there until about 4pm. When we walked onto the beach, we saw a lot of mud-covered people, but to our surprise, THERE WAS NO MUD LEFT! Ok, not exactly NO mud, but pretty much- we were scraping it out of the bottom of buckets and off the street to put on ourselves. Despite that fact, we still had a pretty good time, although I didn't take many pictures because I had my camera stored in a safe, mud-free place most of the time. The two biggest redeeming factors were that it was a nice beach for swimming and that there was a bathhouse (i.e. jjimjilbang- motto: no clothes, just right) right there that only cost $3 to use- it included showers, baths, saunas, mud to cover yourself with (which was where I ended up finding the most mud to get on me), etc. So mud festival = definitely worth it, but get there early.

Cure for Korean World Cup Fever = Switzerland

The month of June was overshadowed, no, make that eclipsed by World Cup Fever here in Korea. Starting around two months before the world cup started, the chants, songs, team colors etc. began to become more and more noticeable, finally reaching a fever pitch the week that the World Cup started.

Ironically, this time was by far the most I've ever paid attention to and cared about a World Cup, and also the most disappointing. While both the US and Korea did very well last World Cup, in this one they fizzled out in the first stage, the US not even scoring a goal itself in any of its games (its one goal of the cup was an autogoal scored by Italy). But Korea- I've never witnessed as enthusiastic and wildly patriotic fans as Koreans, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of them had convinced themselves that all their cheering and support would ensure a stellar performance by their team. However, with a 1-1-1 record, they didn't make it out of the 1st (group) stage, and then all of a sudden World Cup viewership went from about 99.9% to about 5-10%. We went to watch Korea's game against Switzerland in front of City Hall (where I took these pictures), which is the most popular place to cheer and watch the games on big screens. The game didn't start until 4am, but we arrived at 10pm and waited out there on the streets with the tens of thousands of other fans for 6 hours cheering, singing, and waiting for the game to start. Despite all our cheering and hoping, Switzerland beat (and thus eliminated) Korea, and now we've got 4 more years to wait and to come up with more patriotic fight songs.