Seoul with Hyun Ju

Whew. It’s a relief to have finished those long vacation blogs! After that I needed a break from writing and I’m sure that everyone who read those things agrees with me :) However, I’m all rested up and back in the swing of things, so I’m sorry but here’s another really long one!

It was hard to get back into school after vacation ... actually, it’s been two months and I’m still having trouble getting back into school. Winter camp, my unofficial vacation, and my real vacation all lasted so long that I forgot what a normal schedule is like. It doesn’t help that school this semester is more difficult than the last one – I have more after-school classes, and more extra little chores. I’m at school until 5:30pm almost every day; it sucks but I am getting paid more to do the extra work, so I just have to remember that I’m financing my next vacation right now! All the work also makes the time go really quickly – in two weeks my students will have their mid-term exams, which is hard for me to believe.

I’ve been staying busy on the weekends too. I visited two festivals outside of Daegu, which I’ll write about later, and in late March I spent a weekend in Seoul with Hyun Ju, the Korean girl who lives down the hall from me. We decided to head up there because a college friend of hers had an exhibit in the Seoul Living Design Fair 2010, at the COEX complex (I’ll call it a complex but I’m not really sure what to call this place – it houses an aquarium; a 16-screen cinema; the biggest mall in Seoul and largest underground mall in Asia; the Kimchi Field Museum; and the Convention and Exhibition Center, from which it derives its name and which is where the Living Design Fair was). The fair was really cool – it was all about interior design and things for the home, everything you can imagine – furniture, knick-knacks, appliances, decorations, and more. Hyun Ju’s friend was displaying some wall hangings and fabrics that she designed and made herself.

The weekend was tiring – we left before 6am on a Saturday morning, and Hyun Ju had made a jam-packed schedule for those two days. Besides the Living Design Fair and aquarium in the COEX, we hitched a ride across the street to the Bong-Eun-Sa temple (We were lost inside the COEX underground mall – we literally could not find an exit – and a maintenance worker drove us out of the underground parking garage and dropped us off at the street); visited the arty Insadong neighborhood; snacked at a tea house with the best cookies I’ve ever had; tried on hanbok (the traditional Korean costume for women); visited Unhyeongung, a tiny little palace; saw an art gallery or two; and had several fancy traditional meals.

Although not exactly traditional, our most memorable meal was at the top of the N Seoul Tower, on Namsan Mountain. After we finally got there (our cab driver first refused to take us up the mountain, but then took a closer look in the rearview mirror, saw me in the backseat, and informed us that he only drives foreigners up the mountain – Koreans have to take the bus), we took the elevator up 80-some floors to the restaurant where we could look over the city and eat. It was an amazing, gluttonous meal. Most people know that I already love Korean food, but buffets are a Western thing and in the N Seoul Tower restaurant they had a BUFFET OF KOREAN FOOD. Hyun Ju and I were in heaven, literally and figuratively.

We saw a lot of cool things but the most interesting part of the weekend was how we spent the night. To save money, we decided to sleep in a jjimjilbang. A jjimjilbang is like a little town: it’s primarily a bathhouse but can include places to nap or sleep, restaurants and snack bars, movie theaters, arcades, driving ranges, nail salons, computer rooms, singing rooms, gyms, hairdressers, and more. You pay an entrance fee and stay as long as you want.

Jjimjilbang are a big part of Korean culture and social life (there are even TV talk shows hosted in jjimjilbang). Here’s a really good article about it from the New York Times; you should read this first because it isn’t long and sums everything up better than I can.

“For All Kinds of Good, Clean Fun, Koreans Turn to Bathhouses”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/asia/05korea.html?_r=1

We arrived at the Dragon Hill Spa around 9 or 10pm, paid the 12,000 won (less than $11) fee, picked up our towels and clothes, and deposited our shoes in the shoe lockers. We proceeded in the elevator up to the women’s floor (all the doors and elevators are very loudly marked – for men, women, or unisex) and got right down to business in the sauna. It’s a huge room, and there are lots of options. First you shower, and then you can sit in the steam rooms, try the different baths (hot water, cold water, sea water, different kinds of teas…you get the idea), just sit around and chat with friends, or get a professional massage. I joined a gym several months ago, so the shower and sauna part was fine because I’m used to being naked around strangers. The scrub-down / massage was definitely weird though. There are several tables and professional ‘scrubbers’ off in a corner, and for about fifty bucks I had forty minutes with an older women in her underwear (they all just stand around in their underwear in this sauna all day, scrubbing and massaging naked strangers!). First she scrubbed every inch of my body (even behind my ears), then I quickly showered off again, and then I got a massage. The scrub was kind of painful, and you should have seen the dead skin falling off of me. But my skin was soooo soft afterwards.

Hyun Ju and I hung around in the sauna for a few hours, got dressed in the clothes provided for us (a jjimjilbang uniform: loose and comfortable cloth shorts and a t-shirt) and then started the where-do-we-sleep game. There were a few rooms specifically for sleeping, but they were either full or overwhelmingly warm and dry (remember, Koreans use floor heat AND sleep on the floor, so there’s nothing between you and the heat source. It can be a bit much.).

So we headed down to the common room, and if you thought all the nudity was weird, it gets weirder. Picture if you can several hundred people, males and females of all ages, all wearing the same clothes in the same color, having a slumber party together. People were talking, eating, watching movies, listening to music, and sleeping, either on bath towels (available for a deposit) or just passed out on the floor (it was warm enough that you didn’t need a blanket, and there aren’t pillows, except for sometimes wooden ones). It was so odd. I didn’t sleep very well because of the noise and light, but I had to laugh when I woke up the next morning and saw all the perfect strangers passed out together. Again, you should read that NY Times article to get a better idea of how this works and what it means in Korean culture. It was definitely an interesting experience, and something you shouldn’t miss in Korea!

Look at my pictures from this weekend here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg/SeoulWithHyunJu?feat=directlink