This post might well earn me an ‘Adult Content” warning label, but it’s worth it.
Haesindang Park. Samcheok. South Korea. I’ll cut to the chase and just tell you that it’s a park full of sculptural penises. Yes, you read correctly. A whole park devoted solely to to Johnsons. Willies. Wedding tackle. Tally wackers. Schlongs.
It was comforting to hear the peals of laughter rising from all who entered the park, as I certainly couldn’t keep it together. There seemed to be over a hundred penis sculptures around the whole park, in varying degrees of the bizarre.
The big question is of course, why?
Legend has it that there was once a beautiful virgin who was from the fishing village where the penis park now stands. She was engaged to be married to a young man from the village and anxiously awaited her wedding night, desiring an encounter with the famed willy over all else. Perhaps distracted by her preoccupation, she was dragged out to sea by a rouge wave and drowned on the eve of her wedding night, penis-less.
After her death, the fishermen of the village found that their nets were empty. No fish arrived, and the village was on the verge of starving. As Fortune would have it, a drunk fisherman wandered to the sea one night and relieved himself into the waves, exposing his one-eyed monster. The fish miraculously returned, and the village folk saw this as a sign that the ghost of the virgin was sated by the sight of the ding a ling and had made their nets full once more.
Hence, they filled the coast where she drowned with peckers. For the fish, you know.
The fairy tale sounds a bit like an excuse for the men of the village to expose themselves without fear to the sea (“What? I’m just making sure we have fish to eat!”), but it made for a hilarious day. Each statue seemed to have been designed by a different person, and the many incarnations were each more creative than the next.
One of the best parts of the day was the museum, where they had made replicas of sexual objects of worship from the world over, jammed into a room wall to wall with a certain urgency that seemed to say, “See? See? There are other people who made statues of members and vulvas and even worshipped them from other places! Our little village isn’t as weird as it seems!”
The highlight of the day was laughing with Koreans who were highly entertained by the foreign girls wandering the park. An older man and his wife even posed on a penis seat for us. There are few times in life when language isn’t necessary to laugh one’s ass off with a stranger more perfect than that.
I’ll be leaving directions to the Penis Park in the Travel Korea section sometime this week, in case you should find yourself in this corner of the world as desire a trip. It made my cheeks hurt from smiling, so I’d say it’s worth it.
Reverse Retrograde 
This was fantastic – if I remember there is a museum somewhere her in the states that collects those of animals – love the photos.