Bathing with Strangers

Before I came to Korea I avoided nakedness to the best of my ability. Locker rooms made me uncomfortable. Even having my roommates getting ready in the bathroom while I was in the shower took some getting used to. Once I arrived, all of that had to change in a flash because of one relaxing and quintessentially Korean group activity: public bathing.

A jjimjilbang is a gender-separated public bath house where Koreans (and brave foreigners) go to soak, socialize and scrub themselves raw. Tess told me about them long before I arrived in Yeosu, and I was very curious to give it a try before I arrived. Going to Asia was all about new experiences, and baring all in a semi-public place was certainly new to me.

One of my first nights out mingling with Yeosu's wayguk (foreigner) community, I met a nice girl named Kerrie who offered me the chance to try a jjimjilbang on my very first Sunday in Korea. After a harrowing taxi adventure across town (harrowing because of the packed and terrifying driving conditions as well as my inability to communicate with the taxi driver) I met her and two of her friends outside The Ocean Resort, a towering hotel/public bath/water park built along the coastline in preparation for the 2012 World Expo to be hosted in this fair city.

We paid, dropped off our shoes and headed for the locker room. As you might imagine, the first moments of stripping down are the strangest, but a few minutes after you've folded up your clothes safely in your locker and wandered into the bath house you stop noticing. Everywhere around you are women of every shape, size and age completely exposed with no concern for hiding flab, cellulite or stretch marks. So many Korean women appear perfect on the street, sitting around in community with them at this bath house made me feel connected in a way American locker rooms never have. Granted, the connection was not perfect — we foreigners definitely caught a few stares, but it made me wonder if seeing all those women's bodies just as they are would do something for self images back home.

But the jjimjilbang process is not all sitting and contemplating. First, you sweat out all those impurities in a series of super-heated rooms. Some jjimjilbangs have little igloo-shaped rooms covered with crystals, each heated to 35, 45, 60 or even 70 degrees Celsius. One of my most embarrassing moments happened with Kerrie in one of these rooms, but more on that later. Once you are sufficiently sweat-drenched, you rinse off in the shower, then return to hot hot heat to soak in similarly scalding pools. Each pool has water infused with a different herb or mineral, such as jade or green tea. Finally, when your skin is completely pruney, you head to the scrubbing lines, rows of benches in front of mirrors where you exfoliate away all the dead skin on your body, and help your friends or nearby ajjumas (older Korean women) with a back scrub if they can't reach.

Now for my embarrassing story: in addition to having an aversion to public nudity, I am highly heat sensitive. Kerrie and I were sitting in one of these 45-degree-Celsius rooms on that first fateful jjimjilbang outing when she started telling me a story. As I listened to her I felt my head start to spin, but I was determined to hear her out. When she finished, I confessed that I needed to step outside. We stumbled out the door and suddenly my vision went black and I found myself crumpled on the floor. That's right, I fainted, butt naked to the floor in a room full of strangers with only a girl I'd just met to help me. Fortunately she was nice and brought me water without so much as a giggle, but it was still pretty darn embarrassing.