I went to a Korean Spa for the first time this weekend.
My friend had invited everyone to spend the day at the spa with him for his birthday, before the party he was throwing that night. A few of my friends showed up, but most people were waiting for the party. I'd been wanting to check out this spa for awhile, so I jumped at the chance.
Now, when I say "spa," think more, "communal bathhouse" rather than "salon/day spa." You pay $20 to get in, and stay as long as you want. (They're open 24 hours-a-day on the weekends, and they even have a "Nap Room" to sleep in when you want.) There's a restaurant (awesome Korean food); a PC room with computers, video games, and internet; and a gym. But the real attraction is the bathhouse.
As soon as you walk into the place, before you even get to the front desk, you encounter signs indicating "No Shoes Allowed Beyond This Point." So, you have to carry your shoes up to the front desk, where they give you a key to fit a locker there by the entrance, just big enough to hold a pair of shoes. Once you get your shoes off, you can feel that the dark wood floor is actually heated; feels so lovely. Once you pay your entrance fee, they give you another key to a bathhouse locker, and a uniform of simple cotton t-shirt and shorts; men get robin's egg blue, and women get prison orange.
Inside the locker room (men and women each have their own locker rooms, and their own bathhouses, naturally), you can change into your uniform and head out into the communal area if you want. But inside the locker room is the entrance to the bathhouse, and I headed straight for it. Inside were showers (regular and Asian style - a little stool on the ground in front of a mirror, with a handheld showerhead and a large bowl); two large, tiled, bubbling hot "tubs" (they were more like small pools), one of them herbal; two saunas (one wet and one dry); and a cold water pool (only about knee deep and three feet wide, but running the length of the room; obviously meant for bathing, not swimming). In one corner was a massage table, with a naked man getting scrubbed down by an attendant.
In fact, except for the attendant, everybody in the place was completely naked, and making no attempt to cover themselves up, which I found very comforting. I'm used to puritanical American gym locker-rooms, where everyone gets dressed and undressed either with a towel wrapped around them, or in a shower or toilet stall, out of some ridiculous sense of homophobia or something. That environment always leaves me feeling very uncomfortable. It freaks me out to be surrounded by people who are clearly all very afraid of something, and not really have any understanding of what it is that they are so clearly afraid of, exactly. Are they afraid that some "faggot" will see their penis and somehow become aroused? (And if so, why does that frighten them? What does it matter to them at all? And how would they even know that it had happened?) Are they worried that if they get naked the other men will think they, themselves, are a "faggot," trying to show off their penis? (That seems more likely.) Or are American men just incredibly modest and shy? (Haha! Yeah, right!) So I found it incredibly refreshing to be in an environment where nobody had these ridiculous hang-ups that I couldn't understand, and everybody could just relax and enjoy themselves, without getting all squirrely and nervous about something so completely innocuous as being naked in the same room with other men. I think it helped that all the men there were either Asian or Russian. (Apparently, this spa gets a lot of Russians, because it is the closest thing to the traditional Russian bathhouse in the area. They even had one set of their pamplets listing their services up at the front desk printed all in Russian.)
The larger, regular hot bath was empty (presumably out-of-order), so I headed to the herbal hot bath, which probably would've been my first choice, anyways, now that I think about it. This bath has a large cloth sack filled with various herbs hanging off of the faucet so that the water is running down through the bag and into the bath; the bag is also hanging about half into the water, steeping like a tea bag. (They had a sign listing all of the herbs they used, but I don't remember them all at this point; several of them I had never heard of before.) In fact, it felt very much like taking a bath in tea - the water was brown, had little bits of plant matter swirling around in it, and was incredibly aromatic. After about ten minutes in this tub, my skin felt softer and smoother than it has since I was a teenager. In fact, even now, it still feels much softer than usual.
After the herbal bath, I took a quick rinse-off dip in the cold pool (and when they say "cold" they are not lying - it was like ice water!) and then tried out the dry sauna. It was just over 200 degrees in there, and so it wasn't long before I couldn't take it anymore, and headed back out to cool off in the cold pool. Going from the hot to the cold like that is the Russian style, and I find it
unbelievably refreshing and invigorating and sensually satisfying. (Maybe it's genetic.) The hot opens up my pores and loosens my skin, and then the cold tightens it all back up again. The heat brings all my blood out to my extremities and into my skin, and then the cold sends it all flying away from the surface and down into my core. And the simple juxtaposition between the two sensations is very-nearly overwhelming. It leaves me light-headed, but pleasantly so.
After that I tried out the wet sauna, but I couldn't take it for more than a minute. The air is so thick with moisture that you can barely see your hand in front of your face. Whenever I would breathe in, I would feel like there was more water in the inhalation than oxygen, and since I was already a little light-headed, it wasn't long before I felt like I couldn't breathe and had to get out before I passed out. It's a shame, because, other than that, I liked the room. It wasn't as hot as the dry sauna (only about 150 degrees), and the wet air made it feel more like a bath or shower than the dry sauna, which felt more like an oven. And the water that they used to produce the steam was apparently infused with some herb, as well, because it was, like the herbal bath, incredibly and pleasantly aromatic. (The dry sauna actually had a small wicker basket full of cinnamon sticks in the corner, as well, producing a pleasant aroma as they baked in the heat.) I think next time I'll have to try this steam room first, before I do anything else, and see if that works out better for me.
I spent the next hour just going around between the dry sauna, the herbal bath, and the cold bath. It felt
amazing. We had agreed to meet in the communal room at that point, so I dried off, dressed in my powder-blue uniform, and headed out into the communal room, which is between, and connected to, the two locker rooms/bathhouses. The communal room is a large, central room, lined with thick
tatami mats on the floor, and little tables to go with them. (At least, they're called "tatami" in Japanese; I have no idea what they are called in Korean, but they are the same object.) There were also large piles of these small, traditional head-cushions used for lying down on the mats. There was a TV on one wall, playing Korean television. There were Korean newspapers and magazines lying around the room. There were boards for playing Go, Chess/Checkers, Backgammon, etc. scattered all around. At one end was a line of massaging recliners, and beyond that was the "Napping Room" - a small, dark room lined with more tatami mats for sleeping. I tried out one of the massaging recliner chairs, expecting a vibrating massage chair. What I got instead was ten minutes of, essentially, being pummeled in the back by a robot at high speed. It was more percussion than vibration. It hurt like hell at first, but by the end it felt fantastic.
Along the walls of the communal room are smaller rooms of varying temperatures, all dry rooms. The hot rooms were each lined with different materials all over the floor, walls, and ceiling. The Himalayan Salt room was lined with pink rock salt, presumably Himalayan judging by the name, and kept at 130 degrees. The Jewel Room was 150 degrees, and lined with smooth cut slabs of green amethyst. And the Charcoal Room was lined with small cylinders of charcoal, and heated to 170 degrees. (I didn't go into the last, hottest room, and don't remember what it was lined with.) There are also two cold rooms. The Cold Room is about 40 degrees, and then inside the Cold Room is the Ice Room, which is well below freezing, and lined with, predictably, ice. (The sign said it was -21 degrees Fahrenheit, but it had to be Celsius; -21 degrees Fahrenheit would be
dangerous in just a t-shirt and shorts, and while this room was definitely cold, it wasn't painful or distressing. It felt more like about 25-30 degrees Fahrenheit.) Again, I spent a bunch of time going back and forth from the hot rooms to the cold rooms and back again.
We ate lunch in the restaurant, sitting cross-legged on pillows at low Asian-style tables, eating delicious, cheap Korean food. I reflected on the fact that the place was full of families. I could tell that this was a regular family event; you bring the wife and kids and spend the day. It was a like the Korean version of a community center or a YMCA. There was a father and son in the bathhouse while I was in there, the son maybe six years-old. They sat together, naked, at one of the little Asian-style showerheads, the son laying over the father's knee, as he washed and scrubbed his son's whole body over and over for what seemed like at least half an hour. To my Western eyes, this looked decidedly creepy, and I couldn't imagine an American father and son doing this. But at one point I happened to notice the father try to put the son down on the floor next to him and attend to his own washing, but the boy began to pout and plead until the father agreed to pick him back up and wash him again, which made the boy incredibly happy. I tried to look at it through their eyes. This was a bonding moment between a boy and his father. In our culture, we're taught to sexualize nudity in any form regardless of context, and so something like this instinctively seems gross to us. But this wasn't sexual at all. It was loving. And when I stopped myself from seeing it as sexual, and started trying to see it for what it actually was
to them (non-sexual, familial nudity) it became a touching display of affection between a father and son.
I lost track of the hours I spent there, and didn't want to leave. I could easily see how someone could spend all day there. I can't wait to go back. They offer massage services as well (foot massage, body massage, Thai massage, body scrub, etc.) for very reasonable prices, and next time I'm going to book one of those and make a day of it.
