Mud Fest

Off to the Philippines tonight! I'm soooo excited to spend the week at the beach! I guess I should blog about mud fest before I leave.
We went with a group from Rhythm and Booze again this year. They got a bus and we stayed at the same minbak as last year. We were a little disappointed to see rain was in the forecast for the whole weekend. Our trip had been cut short last year because of rain, so we didn't want that to happen again. Anyway, we left Bucheon a little before midnight Friday night. It was about a 2 hour bus ride (much better than last year). It was kinda rainy Friday night, but not too bad. I heard it raining really hard while we were sleeping. When we woke up it was still raining, which isn't a big deal when you're playing in the mud, but it was kinda cold. We started off the day with a delicious ramen breakfast, which i dumped in my lap:( At that point I was happy to have the rain to wash off. hahaha After food, we headed out in search of the mud. We walked toward the beach noticing that we weren't seeing any muddy people... When we got there, someone told us they were bringing in the mud the next day. We found the mud wrestling pit, which was filled with more dirty water than mud. There were people carrying buckets of mud back and forth to the slide. There seemed to be a very limited supply of mud. We were of course very disappointed, but we weren't ready to give up. Mud fest has colored mud painting, which we missed out on last year, but we saw a few colorful people walking around, so we asked them where it was. They told us it was about a 15 minute walk away. We started walking, and we stumbled upon the good mud. The really thick and oozy kind. We joined the huge group of people and covered ourselves in it. So much fun! When we couldn't possibly get any muddier, we walked farther down, eventually finding the colored mud painting. The line was really long, and someone told us it was about an hour wait. The slide lines were really long too. The Noise, a band that came with our group was about to play so we went over to watch that. They were really good. After the concert, we went to the ocean to wash off our mud, then headed back to our minbak. We got clean then went out for samgyupsal for dinner. We were all tired after a long, muddy day, so we went back and took a nap. We woke up later and sat outside for a while. The mosquitos were REALLY bad, and somebody broke my tennis racket bug zapper, so we decided to go to the beach. Some of our group decided to go swimming, but it was a little cold for that. After a while we headed back to the minbak where the mosquitos chased us inside.
We woke up sunday to SUNSHINE! yay! We started off the day with corndogs for breakfast, then headed off to play in the mud. We painted each other at the mud painting booth. We put hand prints on each other, which were sunburned into our skin. Then we went to wait for colored mud. It was worth the wait I think. We had a lot of fun sunday. We went on the slides, hung out in jail, and washed off again in the ocean.
Our bus left at 7:00, so we had a good full day to get plenty of sunburn with mudlines. haha At least no mud rash this year!

Hello Kitty

I got a kitten! It wasn't really a planned thing. I was out shopping with Kristina, and a friend of hers called and asked if she wanted a kitten. She asked me and I was like, "um...i dunno..." and she took that as a yes. We stopped by e-mart on the way home and picked up some food and a litter box, and that night I had a kitten! We decided on the name Hello. Get it?? Like Hello Kitty! haha Hello is sooooo tiny and cute. He meows alllll the time, even when he's eating. Not so fun when I'm trying to sleep, but I still love him.


Anyway, mud fest this weekend! It's supposed to rain:( We leave tonight at 11:00 and dont get back until sunday night. I hope Hello does ok being alone for the weekend.

So Abby came over to make ghetto s'mores last night. Korea doesn't have graham crackers, so we had to use these wafer things... kinda like waffle cones. They were pretty good. Anyway, I left a chocolate bar on the table, and when I woke up the next morning, it was in liquid form. Not just soft, it was completely drinkable. Just thought you guys should know how hot my house is right now. Thanks to Abby, I have a fan now. The AC doesn't do much. Oh well, I'll take this over the evilness of winter any day...

4th of July weekend

As you know, this weekend was 4th of July weekend. As much fun as we had last year with our bbq in the park, we had no desire to be yelled at again, so we decided to have our bbq on the roof this year. We were a little discouraged by the weather forecast (rain), but we went on with our plans deciding we could always move inside if we had to. We missioned it to Costco friday night to pick up needed supplies for our party, then we had a cupcake baking party at kristina's. not an easy thing in korea. who would think it would be so hard to find icing or the stuff to make icing in this country? after searching all over homeplus, we asked a guy who worked there, pointing to the icing on a cake on a box of cake mix. he dragged us all over the store before finally leading us to an empty shelf in the bakery section. no icing. we found tiny bags of powdered sugar, so we bought like 6 of those. finally we began our cupcake baking party. i dont know if kristina doesn't know how to use her oven, or if its just completely useless, but after waiting like an hour for the cupcakes to bake, we finally moved them to the toaster oven. they cooked much faster in there. we made red, white, and blue icing that strongly resembled candle wax, and we made a cupcake flag.

all during our cupcake marathon, we were constantly checking the hour by hour weather updates. it wasn't looking good, but saturday morning there was no rain, saturday afternoon no rain. we went to abby's to get ready for our bbq. kristina and i shaped the meat into hearts, stars, and hello kitty.

abby, her coworker rebecca, and i blew up the kiddie swimming pool (not an easy task).

finally, people started showing up and we headed to the roof. it sprinkled a little when we first went up there, but it stopped not long after that, and that was the last we saw of the rain! it was still cloudy, but it was hot. perfect weather for swimming. at least abby and i thought so.. haha we had a lot of fun. we even got out the water guns and water balloons:)

we went home to change before heading to the park for the magazine party.

we hung out there for a while, went for korean bbq, then back to the park, then FIREWORKS! thank goodness for homeplus. with all our planning, we had forgotten to get fireworks, but abby went to homeplus and got some. i didn't even try to hit anybody with one this year. haha

after fireworks, we went to noraebang. thats always fun. we ended the night with a slumber party at my house. what slumber party is complete without mcdonalds delivery in the morning? the sun was out, and being the real 4th of July, how could we not get the pool back out? so we blew it up one more time and we managed to fit 4 of us into the pool (a little cozy, but still fun). we were up there a while before the little security guard came to yell at us. i dont know how we managed to not get yelled at the day before...anyway, we had to say goodbye to our pool:( we stayed up there a while in the sun (my sunburn is lovely). abby and kristina went to bucheon station to go shopping, but i decided to just stay home to relax and recover from another fun, but exhausting weekend! On the agenda for weekends to come: next weekend=shopping, 2 weeks=mudfest!, 3 weeks=the PHILIPPINES!!! We just got our hotel booked! It looks really nice! I can't wait to be on the beach!

NEH Magazine

Check out the article Abby, Kristina, and I did for Bucheon's foreigner magazine!
http://issuu.com/nehzine/docs/issue_4