The Jjimjjilbang Debacle.

I had a nightmare. My friends wanted to go to a public bath house, where I would have to strip down in a women’s locker room, walk passed staring Koreans and into a room with many shared soaking tubs and scrubbing areas, and had odd conversations with English-speaking students and their grandmothers while naked. I watched as we attracted more and more children to our tub, increasing in number exponentially each time I noticed them, like a virus. Then I was convinced to have a sadistic middle-aged Korean woman in bra and panties scrub me with a Brillo pad. Then I realized I was awake.

It was all real. The humiliation, the stares, the delightful conversation with a gifted high schooler and her grandmother while naked and sitting in a hot tub of water and ginger. It was all real. And at present, my skin was screaming for relief from this crazy scrubby woman.

The next step was just confounding. She oiled me up for the “massage” portion of our program, which I later discovered basically consisted of cupped hands hitting me in different places all over my body. As I lay there being greased, I kept thinking of how I could possible explain this horrid adventure to Westerners, who could never fathom of this being in the realm of possibility. It was a toss up between “She lubed me like a chassis” and “I was basted like a Thanksgiving turkey.” Before I knew it she frosted my face with a cucumber mask, made of pulpy real cucumber. It felt disgusting, and made me hungry for a salad. While I endured the pain of my “massage” I thought about the fact that this woman’s work clothes are a bra and panty set. I started to wonder how many sets she had, and if she hung them up nicely in her closet like other people hang up suits. I was brought back to reality when the oil slid me nearly off the table with the force of her slap.

And my friends can’t figure out why I don’t care to go again. Hmmm.