Mud Fest

This past weekend we got the opportunity to do something that few grown people have the opportunity to do: play in the mud! Every year Korea holds an annual Mud festival in July. Tons of foreigners and Koreans head down to Boryeong to participate in all of the muddy festivities. There are tents where you can paint yourself with colored mud, hug mudslides, mud wrestling pits, mud obstacle courses and a big mud prison where you get sprayed with a mud hose for about ten minutes. The ocean was right next to the mud place, so when you got too dirty you could just run on and wash yourself right off. The first day we got there it was actually pouring down rain. We donned our swimsuits and ran off with our friends to play in the mud. We went down mud slides, danced in the rain, played in the ocean and just had fun. So much stress got relieved in the process, although just about everyone managed to injure themselves in some way, shape or form this weekend. I got scratched up on one of the slides (the mud was kind of gritty and when your going pretty fast down the slides it will cut you up!). Our friend Ferrin really tore up her leg while riding an ATV through the mud and getting thrown off. Thankfully she wasn't hurt too bad! We really had God watching over us most of the weekend!
David got a few shots of people in the mud. He didn't want to take his camera out when WE were actually in the mud, so there are no shots of us all muddy, but this gives you an idea of what everything looked like:


The hajima who owned the pension we stayed in insisted on washing us off before we went into the house!




Me with the mascot: a guy with mud on his face!

There was also a pretty big concert with some big name Korean bands there and a huge fireworks show on Saturday night.
This week is basically a count-down to our Thailand adventure! Our friends Nathan and Tina Smiddy arrive on Wednesday to visit Korea for a few days before we set off to Bangkok and have a phenomenal time! I'm super excited. Every day I dance around with my class and sing the countdown till vacation! Ha. We're also getting into the thick of planning New Zealand, so I'm growing very anticipatory about that.
In other news, there was a really huge fire in our city, we could see it all the way from our apartment window. I'm really not sure if anyone was hurt or not, but it was a pretty huge smoke stack as you can see.