So I’ve decided to start a blog (which I hate with a fiery passion) on my trip to Korea. I do this out of a sense of self-preservation because rather than spending all my time telling everybody individually how my trip is going, I can shout it into the ether that is the internet, feel content in my efforts, and go out drinking instead. So in the direction of that noble cause, I present you all with the first few days of my Korean adventure.
My trip got off to a blistering start, with an all-nighter the night before designed to help prevent jet-lag by screwing up my sleep schedule enough to just slip into Korean time. I must say that at this point it has worked quite well. Besides one night of going to bed around 9 PM, I have found the transition pretty easy. However, not everything went so smoothly. The most obvious example of this would be one of my friends confusing the date of my arrival, meaning that I was stuck at the airport calling around with a borrowed cell phone attempting to get somebody I knew in Korea to come collect me. Luckily another one of my friends living in Incheon (a city just Southwest of Seoul) came to my rescue. With a posse including his mother and sister we went out for bulgogi, a Korean beef dish that one cooks at their table. I was informed at this time that his house was too messy, so my friend, his sister, and I would be sleeping in a bathhouse. This is clearly not something that would happen in America. In fact, the whole bathhouse experience is bizarre enough that it warrants its own paragraph.
A bathhouse in Korea is very much unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in America. To begin with, you pay, and then the men and women separate. Next, you walk in and take off your shoes (something I’m rapidly getting used to) and place them in a locker. You then proceed to exchange the shoe-locker key for a clothing-locker key in a bizarre and surprisingly inefficient process. Additionally, you are given a baggy pair of shorts and a shirt. Perhaps you wander into the bathroom, where you notice that in each stall there is an ashtray, as well as bad poetry/maxims posted on the door for your reading and contemplating pleasure. So far, not so strange. It is at this point however that you notice the large number of naked men wandering around, blow-drying their hair, cleaning their ears, etc. This is clearly the part that your Korean friend has been carefully warning you about the entire time, as “You may be uncomfortable. Korea is very different from America.” After stripping down and storing your clothes you proceed to the shower, sauna, and hot tub room. It turns out that Koreans have a strong affinity for heat, so pretty much everything in the country is somewhere in the range from hot to cook-you-alive. This includes the food, the floors, the seats on the subway, and the 100 degree Celsius saunas. While almost everything in this room is boiling hot nobody seems to mind very much, as it is, much like everything else in this country, “good for your health.” The best way to describe the place would be to imagine the bathhouse scene from Eastern Promises, but with less tattoos and knife fighting and more Asian people. After spending your time in the saunas and hot tubs you get redressed in your baggy clothing and head down to sleeping room. Down there they have multiple places to eat, televisions always showing Korean soap operas, swings, hammocks, cave-like cubby holes, more saunas, heated floors, and pads to sleep on. This is also where you meet back up with the opposite gender. It is clearly a place that groups of friends and couples go to hang out and sleep for the night. What is less expected are the many families that spend the evening sleeping on the floor of a bathhouse rather than the beds of their own houses. This whole bizarre sleeping arrangement would all be fine and good if it weren’t for the incessant snoring on the night I was there. Three old men were keeping me awake each sounding like either the traditional suffocating pig, the less traditional blowing bubbles in milk, or the even more strange blowing raspberries in a walrus’s stomach. Needless to say, I did not get much sleep.
I mentioned earlier that pretty much everything in this country is deemed good for your health. This cannot be understated. At various points, I’ve been told of soup that is good for cancer, digestion, and “men’s health.” I’ve been told that drinking water with your meal is bad for digestion, and that sitting halfway in a hot tub is a good method for losing weight. To imagine how universal this is here, it would be like walking into a McDonalds in America and having a friend tell you that cheeseburgers are good for headaches, fries are a good treatment for gout, and McNuggets cure lupus. I have a strong feeling that I will come back to America as the healthiest man in the country.
At any rate, that seems to be a good summary of my first 12 hours in the country. Seeing as at this rate I'll end up with something the size of the collected works of Dickens by the time I'm done I certainly won’t be updating quite so often. Keep tuned anyways. Up next: free unsolicited photoshopping.
