Muddy Feet: Ansan Part 1

I got on the bus to Ansan at 12:30 leaving summer camp early just to make it. Friends had already left and had tents set up for when myself and another Ultimate traveler got to Ansan. The bus took 7 hours to get up to entrance of the entrance to the concert. Unlike the party bus to Mudfest nothing happened on this bus. We hopped out grabbed our packs and walked ten minutes in the humid fog to get to the ticket booths. Once the wristband was on, we set out for the grounds.

This was the best way to walk towards a rock festival you could imagine. The road down to the grounds was a straight asphalt path with marshland on either side. There were buildings on one side but the fog covered up the civilization I was leaving for the next 2 and a half days. On the other side there were wind mills. Since the sun had set there was pink neon trim on the blades, contrasting with the lush greens and the steely fog of the marsh. The fact the XX was playing too made the journey down all the more surreal. When we arrived we threw our stuff into a bag check and went out to search for our friends at the XX. I was surprised how quickly we found them. Listening to the tranquil broken ballads of the XX put me at even more ease now that I had arrived. After the show ended we went on to go see the Cure who had a 3 hour set.

I was really bummed that I missed Vampire Weekend, one of my favorite bands at the moment and apparently they blew the show out of the water along with a band called Polyphonic Spree. Thankfully no one brought their performance until I had my own socks blown off Saturday.

To be honest I thought the Cure wasn't a half decent band and offering them a 3 hour set was the dumbest thing in the world. Here are the bullets.

• Robert Smith looks like shit: He's fattened up big time and looks like he's lived in a swamp for a while. His hair is just a thin stringy mess and he had some really emo/ ajuma garb on (loose black something other with sequins) and messy lip stick. At first glance I thought Marilyn Manson was up there melting. 
• Maybe I'm not a connoisseur of their genre but when they started playing a new song I thought "Oh, I've heard this song before, no, wait, this sounds slightly different." For all of the songs I listened to intently.  
• No one on stage made any attempt at communicating to the audience. It made the experience almost unmentionable.

While this snooze fest was going on this is what happened in no particular order:

• Got a foot rub from a stranger.
• Tested out a cheesy pick-up line, which could have worked (details later).
• Drank copious beers and some high-class water bottle rum.
• Met new and exciting people. 
• Learned new things (Don't watch The Cure live: buy an album instead)
• Blankets and tarps are amazing at concerts, especially after heavy rains.

The weather was just overcast on Friday according to the weather report but it had rained the past couple days in the Greater Seoul Area. As a result the grass was really muddy and it had coated my shoes by the end of the night. After The Cure, we stumbled back to the tents to drop off our things. This was the moment where the festival started to feel like a festival. I took my shoes off and didn't wear anything on my feet until I got off of the grounds Sunday night. Back to the mud, it was way better quality mud than the pasty grey Mudfest-mud. Glass bottles and metal cans were not allowed on the grounds except red bulls with the staff poured them into cups and threw out the cans. Everything else was plastic so there was no threat to my feet apart from rocks and some loose gravel here and there.

We went back and saw some really up and at'em Korean bands that brought me back to the teenage years where Green Day, SUM 41 and Blink 182 CDs owned my ghetto blaster. At some unspecified time I went to bed peacefully waiting for the next day of madness.