I’m in love with all things Seoul, despite the fact that there was pounding rain the entire time. Imagine what it would have been if it wasn’t rainy.
I had the greatest experience yesterday. We went to a traditional korean sauna. It was not only a spa, but an entire entertainment complex actually. It was amazing. When you enter, you are given a locker. Then you shower. I walked into a room bigger than a basketball courts, with 3 hot (one warm, one hot, one super hot) tubs in the middle, 2 with a big "tea-bag" in them (herbal tubs).At the end of the room were 2 cold (one cold, one freezing) pools with a ‘massage waterfall’ and mist sprays. One each side were 4 sauna rooms, each with its own ‘theme’: one jade room with a herbal mist spray, one really dry "mud room", one more humid one and a steam room. Lining the sides of the walls were short showers with stools in front, and of course dozens of completely naked Korean women, young and old….but more about that later.
Soo (my friend who raised the bar for what it means to be the hostess with the mostess) and I took a quick shower before heading out first. We were hungry. We were given a set of T-shirt and shorts given at the front desk. Then we came out to the unisex area (dressed of course) and went downstairs to a huge hall filled with people, families, couples, just hanging out on mats, watching TV, talking, reading. You could get a massage, a manicure, a haircut, get yourself waxed, have a facial…you name it. And then, there’s another section where its a restaurant.Grab a meal, a dessert or a pint (they had 32 ouncers). Everyone walks around barefoot. The atmosphere was like visiting someone’s house, only with a lot more people around. We had our lunch sitting on the floor. Then we proceeded to the sauna area.
We usually think of a sauna as just a small wooden room where you sweat.This took it to the next dimension of ’sauna’. It was a massive space, maybe the size of 3 basketball courts. In the middle, there was 2 cauldron looking chambers, each a different type of saunas. lining the place were different sauna rooms, ranging from 70 degrees celcius (about 160F…phew! your nostrils start to burn) to an airconditioned room (about 18 celcius, 65F). There were sleeping rooms with comfortable temperatures. You walk into the room, and there’s 10-15 people snoring side by side. We rotated, sweated at different levels of sweat, chilled in the air-conditioned room, then went out to have a traditional Korean drink (forgot the name, but it was all gingery, sweet, with rice in it) with crushed ice. YUM!
Then, back to the showers as I described earlier. This was Harbin Hot Springs multiplied by 20. It’s funny how, as Soo told me, most of these women would -never- dream of wearing a 2 piece bathing suit outdoors, but in the showers, everyone has no qualms about walking around in their birthday suits. La-dee-dah. I love it. Korean women don’t like to tan much. They are all the same shade of ivory. In fact, they hardly like to exercise/work out at all. I was told that they’d rather starve than to exercise. It’s a society consumed with thinness. And, according to Soo, with "wellbeingness". Everything is marketed to how to preserve health. Thankfully, this bleeds into more postive social externalities: Koreans are leading proponents of environmentalism. Their toothpicks are made of a kind of starch that dissolves!
After we spent an hour sweating in the hot rooms then splashing in the ice cold water then soaking like a tea-bag in the teabag tub, we proceeded to sit on the stools and start scrubbing. So you see, we have this entire layer of black dead skins cells that I never know I had. We each had a small loofah cloth. Everyone around us was scrubbing scrubbing scrubbing themselves. You see women scrubbing their daughters. Soo told me is a tradition for moms to bath their daughters this way, and many childless women yearn to do that. It’s a thing of envy to have a daughter to scrub. What a beautiful thing. We are all so self-conscious about our bodies in normal contexts. What a great way to bond just letting it all hang out. And friends do that for each other too. Soo scrubbed my back, and all this disgusting dead skin cells start rubbing off! It’s like an eraser. It was such a great bonding period (dispel dirty thoughts, nerds) between us.
We spent pretty much a good 4 hours in the sauna…and I felt like we were rushing to go already. The social aspect of this place was amazing. You can’t help but bond spending the day chatting, sweating, bathing and scrubbing together. I left the sauna in a dreamy state, wishing I could do this 3 times a week as Soo does with her mom. I loved that it was not a lah-dee-dah upper-middle class trendy hippie place like Western spas tend to be. And no tourists (only me)! And it cost only US$6 for entry per day!
We rushed home to change for clubbing. We met up with a bunch of Soo’s friends at Hongdae, near an art university, famous for its youth culture. The streets were filled with stores with beautiful handmade jewelry. Remember what I said about horrible dressing sense? Didn’t apply here, at least not too much. It was refreshing to see some kids dress differently. There were about 6 of us, chilling (i.e. filling up with cheaper alcohol…the Koreans drink aLOT) at the bar before heading to the club that one of her friends knew. I was actually bracing myself for a horrid experience. I was told that in many Korean cluibs, girls and guys go in their individual groups, and the waiters would apparently pull girls to a guys’ table and the girl is expected to have a drink with them. She can stay if she wants. Leave if she didn’t. I was plotting ways to get out of that.
Outside the club, there was a big sign "No minors. No G.I.s" I asked what GIs were. They were American military soldiers. Apparently, American soldiers are banned not only from the club but from the entire Hongdae district because they were known to cause violent trouble there. There is, I have been told by a few Koreans, quite a strong sense of anti-Americanism here, especially with the younger generation, despite the youth driven boom to learn English (aren’t we all victims of contradictions.Given that all our cultures have been kissed by American culture, how could it be otherwise?). The older generation associate Americans as benign soldiers giving them candy when Korea was stuck in poverty back in the day. The younger generation blame America/the West for their tough IMF policies they imposed on them, on being dependent on America for their defence, etc, and now, on the Iraq war. Soo, who has lived in America since she was 7, believes that they have very dangerous one-sided views. but how could it be otherwise, if most of them don’t know English enough to read anything other than what their Korean media feeds them? Soo thinks most of them can’t differentiate between being anti-bush and anti-American. The onus is on respectful Americans that travel to their country to prove them otherwise then.
So we go downstairs, and I was more than pleasantly surprised. It’s called MWG (Myungwolgwan). It was probably one of the better clubs I’ve been to in some time. It’s a small intimate club, kinda reminding me of Sileo in NYC. There was a great vibe with the crowd, no BS, peope there just to dance. It started off with soul house, and later progressed to harder progressive house. A cafe latte and 2 shots of tequila (ya can’t be !) I was raving on the dance floor. I met a Canadian and an Australian, both of whom were English teachers ("98% of white people you see here are either military men or English teachers" one of them told me), the latter was also the floor manager of the club who works there in the weekends. It was great chatting with both the Korean locals and the expats about Seoul.
Spas, nudists, health freaks, environmentalism, great clubs…sounds kinda like California….not really.
