another interesting weekend

Oh, after such a hellish week, I came home Friday night and immediately began drinking some makgeolli, just to forget about it. No, I never, ever, ever drink alone, and yes, the week was that difficult. Briana and I agreed to go to a jimjilbang (private bath house) for the night, because the one she knows of is rather like a spa palace. After a drunken shower and shave (public nudity necessitates a bit of preparatory clean-up), I made my way to Briana's house, and we left for the Dragonhill Spa by Yongsan subway station.

And wow.

So much happened there that it's almost daunting to try to describe.

The entrance has a large, squatting, naked sculpture of a woman, which I obviously took photos with. The entrance is several people behind a kiosk-type desk, taking money and giving radio wrist-bands with keys attached to the patrons. You take your shoes off, put them in a locker, and proceed around a corner to an elevator.

Up three floors is the women's locker room, and the first thing off the elevator is another counter where you may purchase any kind of facial wash or scrub, body wash or scrub, tooth brush, shampoo and conditioner, bras, underwear, scrubby pads, dresses, purses, and nourishing face masks. You can walk up naked and buy armfuls of stuff, and simply scan your radio wrist-band and have it tallied up for you for later.

So, we changed our clothes; or rather, we took off our clothes and stuffed them into a locker, and then wandered around with all the other naked ladies into the public bath house area. This place was a palace, pure and simple. There were dozens of shower stalls, big tiled baths with water spilling in from fixtures resembling animals or vases, and a sauna and steam room at one end of the L-shaped room, with a bunch of tables set up at the other end for the ajumma to scrub your naked body. First, we took showers and used a bunch of the packets of wash and scrub that we bought at the counter in the locker room, and then we tested the waters in the various tubs (with the temperature displayed digitally above each). We wandered all around the bath house and eventually got hungry and changed back into the occultist matching cotton t-shirt and elastic shorts. Everybody had a set.

We went downstairs to a floor with a restaurant, snack bar, giant miscellaneous room, and several sleeping rooms. This floor also had a very large pool, but that was not accessible for the season, so we could only look at it through the locked glass doors. We went to the restaurant and ordered food and sat with the other cult members and I marveled at how hard my week got towards the end and how it makes me hate myself so thoroughly by Friday night, every week. This being Friday night, my feelings were right on par.

After dinner, we went into the giant miscellaneous room, complete with an enormous HD television in the middle of the room, a gaudy gold- and red-covered throne, 20 or so massage chairs (Sharper Image-esque) all along one wall, a snack bar, King Tutenkhamen golden statue, artificial waterfall rock formation, two ten-foot-high Egyptian-style pyramids, and four gigantic crystal chandeliers on the ceiling. Whoever designed this room must've been throwing money at a novelty catalog with absolutely no sense of taste. To top it off, the most bizarre thing by far, there were at least fifty people sleeping all over the floor, sprawled out in their little matching cotton getups. Many of them were couples, and almost everyone had a little "pillow" to rest on; a vinyl-covered brick with padding within.

Across the room was a doorway guarded by three 3' statues of emperor penguins, and this led to an ice room, the complete opposite of a sauna. It was extremely cold and only tolerable for about two minutes. There were stairs leading down to a game room with computers and racing games and arcade games and the like, with another sleeping room leading off of that. Everywhere I walked things seemed more and more curious (curiouser and curiouser, if you will).

Since by this time, it was after 2am, Briana and I resolved to sitting in some massage chairs and scanning our wrist-bands for a relaxing seven minutes. Briana fell asleep during hers, but I was too stunned by the oddities around me and how everyone was so nonchalant and comfortable.

The unfortunate part of being an insomniac is the inability to sleep, otherwise it's not too bad. Here I was, trapped in guaranteed discomfort, with lights on in every "sleeping" room, and dozens of people around me making individual noises. My only options were the brick pillow and the floor, with the possibility of darkness in a room that was too hot and totally crowded with snoring women, otherwise I could join the couples on the stone floor in the miscellaneous room, or the sleeping room that smelled like a fireplace, or...I could stay awake and panic because there was no chance in hell I was going to sleep despite my fatigue. Times like this ruin good, relaxing baths and soaks.

Eventually I slept, but woke up with some tall woman poking her feet in my face repeatedly, so after only two hours, I was awake and facing the same ordeal all over again. I took my iPod and sojourned through the various floors with bloodshot eyes and a brick pillow and my two hand towels (no blankets). After another two hours in a cooler room with some couples, listening to an ambient album only barely masking the roaring sinuses of some man at the end of the room, I staggered back up to the previous room that was at one time dark. For some reason, the sunlight seemed more inviting and relaxing and I fell asleep immediately, and was rewarded with an additional three and a half hours of decent sleep.

The next morning, when Briana and I dragged out of the sleeping room, we showered again, and found the ajumma ready to scrub and massage our bare bodies. For 40 bucks, it was extremely long and thorough, and rather painful. My ajumma even washed my hair after scrubbing my junk. Briana and I spent another half hour outside (in the private enclosed area accessible from the bathhouse) slipping around on plastic pool furniture (we were also covered in lavender oil). We decided we would grab some lunch at the restaurant before we left for the day, and so we changed and went down to purchase drinks.

What?! The wrist band doesn't work anymore?! We were told we had to go pay for more time, but that was just the answer we needed. We'd already been there 14 hours, and it was high time to move on.

If I could've taken pictures in this place, you would certainly have a better idea of how insane it is, and why it's so extremely popular! Thanks, Dragonhill Spa!

After that, we had dinner and went to see "The Watchmen" at the gigantic mall next door.

Sunday I had lunch with the girls plus some other folks I don't see often (actually I've only met them once before on New Year's Eve), and then the girls and I went to get some extra taekwondo training in Gangnam. I did yoga, jogged, roundhouse-kicked, jumped on a trampoline and flipped over onto a mat, and lifted weights for five hours. Then we grabbed some Indian food in Hyewa, which was TOTALLY delicious, and then some ice cream at the Cold Stone (Koreans are obsessed with ice cream).

That's not exactly a nutshell, but it makes for a short week when my weekends are so awesome!