Dragon Hill jjimjilbang

[deralte]

Yesterday, I took a friend to Dragon Hill jjimjilbang. She'd lived in Japan before so she was used to Japanese onsen, but I figured I'd introduce her to the Korean version. She lives pretty close to the place too. Lucky. Anyway, she was shocked how many pools there were in Dragon Hill and it really is a good deal considering it was $11, and I paid $10 for the Happy Day Spa in Hongdae which only has four pools. (Dragon Hill had 9 that were filled and two more which weren't atm.) We paid to get a scrubbing done which is when an ajumma (middle-aged woman) scrubs your skin so hard (you are naked, shes in her underwear and bra) that it removes the top layer of the skin. It's pretty weird especially since they do scrub you everywhere, but it does make your skin really soft afterwards. The ajumma tried to hard sell us on getting a more expensive oil massage for $60 but since I know where to get a 1hr shiatsu massage (called a sports massage here) for $33 it wasn't much of a deal. When I kept telling her it was too expensive, she swatted me on the shoulder and said it was truly cheap. But I think then she figured out we were students because she asked if I was and I told her grad students and that got her to stop. They also shampoo your hair at the end for some reason which I guess it just part of the service.

We ate dinner in the restaurant there. It was a very good bibimbap, though they really skimp on the meat, and the seaweed soup wasn't the best. We also had a 'chewy egg' which seems to be boiled in soy sauce and sugar. It comes out of the shell kinda gooey and translucent, if brown. Tasty if a bit odd because it's sweet. After surveying the saunas, we went back to have one last bath and wash our hair properly (since there's no point in doing it before you go in the baths imo). I pulled a muscle in my leg while I was getting in one of the baths at the end. The pain faded away after being in the pool for awhile so I didn't think of it, and if I was limping when I got home I thought it was just from climbing too many stairs, but today I woke up and there's sharp pain in one of my muscles if I flex the foot. Guess I'm not going anywhere today.

Comments

[deralte.livejournal.com]

I find that older women wander around the baths in Korea and Japan and don't care about their nudity at all. Younger women are more likely to be shy and hold the small towel so it covers their breasts or groin. We saw two girls who came into the bath wearing their underwear and holding towels over their breasts and both of us wondered which country they were from since you'd never see a Korean or Japanese woman doing that (clothing pollutes the baths...). There are still a few mixed gender hot springs hidden away in Japan. When I went in the Japanese men rather blatantly broke the no clothing in bath rule by dropping their towels to cover their groins, and me and a friend were the only women in there.

The holding hands thing extends across genders, though it may be dying out in the younger generations. I saw two middle aged Korean men the other night holding hands as they drunkenly walked home. I had a female Japanese friend who would almost invariably grab my hand when we walked home from class, despite us being in university.

Total strangers will scrub your back here in Korea if they see you're alone at the baths while in Japan, it's more reserved for close friends and family. Me and some friends in Japan were giving each other massages in the bath and a woman asked us if we were sisters and seemed surprised we were only friends. I've had Japanese women invade my personal space while in the bath a lot more so far than Korean women though.

And yet kissing in public very rarely happens. You can wear the shortest skirt possible, but heaven help you if you show off more than the barest hint of your cleavage. (I brought all my least cleavage showing shirts, but I'm size DD so it's hilarious how Korean men will just blatantly stare. I'm pretty certain none of them even see my face. It happened in China as well while Japanese men were more subtle about it.)