The MUD Festival was indeed muddy, and was part of a long and crazy weekend. We left Busan early on Saturday morning, around 8am, and then drove over 4 hours to get to the Hite (beer) brewery in Jeonju. We went on a full bus of Busan foreigners, so there were over 40 people pre-partying at 9am on our bus! After a rather silly beer tour, since the plant was effectively closed down for the day, we got what we had come for: silly trinkets. Of course, there was the "as much beer as you can drink in 20 minutes" challenge first... which may have directly impacted the number of Hite-logo trinkets purchased. We got a nice bandanna and a bottle opener - not a bad deal for $2.50!
From there we went to Boryeong, which is a small mostly upscale "tourist ghetto" with endless hotels and restaurants. Everything is there for the Mud Fest, where millions of people turn up for days of mud fun, drinking, and beaching. After quickly checking in at our hotel - where we totally lucked out since we only had 3 people (ourselves and Blaise) while most rooms were jammed full with 5, we then headed out to the beach. The water was nice and warm, and the mud was gray and soothing. Everywhere people were covered with mud, and there were plenty of mud pits, slides, paintbrushes, and other ways to get muddy. A huge stage was setup with bands playing during the daytime, and all the corner stores were selling beer as frantically as they could. Saturday we meandered about the whole afternoon and evening, pausing for a bit to take in the spectacular fireworks display around 10pm, after which the whole Busan crew moved down to the beach. Good times were had, Blaise got soaked while watering the ocean, blah blah blah. Had a tasty dinner of oysters roasted over a fire, and then some late-night cappuccinos for, um, balance.
Sunday was a bit more low key, but still muddy and fun since we played with a beach ball down by the beach between swims. We also had a great sushi lunch, got some free mud soap, and got as muddy as we wanted to get :-)
This week at school's flown by, and this coming weekend (as in tomorrow night) we are taking an overnight bus on Friday to the far north-east corner of South Korea. We are meeting Sunny's family, and along with Nayoung and Blaise are going to go rafting near a gorgeous national park. We'll be staying at a nice condo thanks to Sunny, and we also have plans to go hiking in Seoraksan National Park and then hit up the east-coast beaches for a bit. So the two opposite coasts of Korea in 2 weekends: not too shabby.
We'll have a full report on rafting this next week, and then starting July 26 we have our much-anticipated summer vacation! Anderson's parents are coming from the US to visit us, so it should be a lot of fun to show them around our new home. We haven't seen them in about 2 years, so it will be nice to catch up, be Korean tourists, and eat lots of tasty food together. Plus, we don't get many vacation days with our job, so this one-week vacation is literally our longest of our entire 16 months in Korea.

That's that from B-Town
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