Seoul - Day 13

Today Seok hyung called me up and asked me if I wanted to go to the Jisan Rock Festival. I was indecisive, because frankly I'm not a festival type of guy. Plus, I've never even been to a hip hop festival, and with all the rain these days it was bound to be a super messy rock event. He told me the resort was only about an hour drive away from Seoul. We got free tickets and we would only stay till like five in the morning. I know he was trying to convince me, but none of those arguments worked for me.

Who else is going, I asked, and he named a few guys I don't even know too well. So it was far away from Seoul, which implied that I would be stuck there with no possibility to bail out in case it would suck, it was at a mountain resort with a hundred percent rainy weather forecast, it was a crew of people who I didn't know, and it was rock music. So except for the free tickets there was really nothing that appealed to me in any way, let alone convince me to say yes to this adventure. 

And I think that might have been exactly why I agreed to come along. I admit, it was a bit impulsive. He said, okay there's this rock festival thing bla bla bla, you wanna come? But you have to move now, right now. We hung up and I packed an umbrella, an extra set of clothes, board shorts, flip flops and some cash, and ran to the subway station. After two stops I got a seat, and then came the doubts. For the rest of the ride I made a mental list of all the positive arguments. And after thirty minutes I gave up. 

As it turned out, we didn't really have any free tickets. What we had was a friend who's signed up as an artist. He had a ticket. And another friend who was already in had a ticket, too. So what we did was wait outside and smuggle each one of us in. One came out with two wrist bands and gave the extra one to one of us. We used a strip of scotch tape to hold it together and look casual when we passed the security check at the entrance. It was raining hard and I was thankful that we really made it in. All of us.

Once we were in though, I finally loosened up. There were a bunch of different stages and booths, and we hung out in the Jägermeister area, because our friend Seongwon a.k.a. Dj Someone was playing his set there. To my big surprise and great great relief Dj Jinmoo hyung was there, too, and he sort of coordinated the turntables. So they played strictly mellow beats in that corner, and listening to great tunes while drinking free Jäger Bombs it suddenly started to make sense. It was all good.