Korean Spa Experience

After work on a Friday night, I went to a Korean spa with some girls. The spa was open 24 hours, and many people actually go to sleep there. There were something like four floors to the spa and all sort of different rooms. We sat in hot rooms, cold rooms, steam rooms and numerous pools. The pools had things like green tea or dirt in them, and no, the dirt was not from us dirty westerners. I went in a steam room that was about 200 degrees. In case you are wondering, 200 degrees is pretty hot. There were also other various rooms like a movie room and a computer room. There was even Dr. Fish. You may be wondering what Dr. Fish is. I had seen advertisements on the subway where people were sitting in pools and they were little fish swimming around them. I was quite perplexed by these ads. Why would you want to sit in a pool with fish? Apparently the fish like to eat dead skin. Yes, Dr. Fish is where you sit in a pool with fish that nibble at your skin. Being a biologist, I think about this as a mutualistic symbiotic relationship. The fish benefits because it gets a tasty meal of my flesh, and I benefit by being exfoliated. Who doesn't like having soft skin? I hear that there is a Dr. Fish coffee shop where you can stick your feet in the pools and drink coffee while the exfoliation occurs. Sign me up for Dr. Fish. While we didn't do the Dr. Fish experience at the spa, we did get a Korean scrub, which was a cultural experience in itself. I may not have mentioned this before, but Koreans are very comfortable with being naked at the gym. So much so that we actually have made friends with women while naked in the sauna. One day, I was showering at the gym and one of our friends was next to me. Out of nowhere, she leaned over, grabbed my shower scrubby thing and proceeded to scrub my back for me. I didn't really know how to respond to that. Am I supposed to reciprocate? Say thank you? I didn't know what to do so I just continued talking to her and pretended it wasn't happening. Now I am going off on a tangent (like I often do in class- sometimes I wonder if the kids ask me questions purely to get me off on some tangent instead of doing the classwork). Back to the scrubs at the spa. Basically, people walk around very naked (is it possible to be more naked than just plain normal naked because if it is, then that is how naked people are). I doesn't help when you are the only white people around; it just makes people stare more. Seeing naked people is one thing, but being touched by people when you are naked is a whole other story, and that is just what happened with the scrubs. The women who do the scrubbing wear lacey, black panties and bras (well, some of them wear bras), but they are old Korean women. They scrubbed every surface of my body. I really do mean EVERY surface, including the palms of my hands, behind my ears, and my butt crack. Seriously. They have special scrubby thingies that take off the top 953 layers of skin. I had to keep my eyes closed for two reasons. The first being that I didn't want to see all of the clumps of dead skin flying off of me, and the second being that I didn't want to get any glimpses of the naked people getting scrubbed next to me. The Koreans are not especially gentle people, which was very evident during the scrubbing process. Since I don't speak Korean, the scrubber couldn't tell me to turn over or lift my arm so she just grabbed me and yanked me around. The scrubbing is pretty abrasive as well, so I was left feeling a bit like I had been attacked by an older Korean women in black underwear. However, my skin felt really soft. I don't know which is a better way to get soft skin, the scrub or Dr. Fish.