still trying to catch up on posting the last things i did before leaving korea.

my ex-girlfriend yeo (려정) emigrated to america about ten years ago, and about a month ago had her first opportunity to go back and visit korea. she was staying with her aunt near seoul, so way back on saturday, november 19th, we met up.

i was feeling really sick with a bad cold, so yeo suggested that we go to a 찜질방 (jjimjilbang), which she explained was like a sauna and would be good for my cold. she strongly suggested that i drink some orange juice for my cold, so as we stopped at a convenient store to get some she asked where the nearest jjimjilbang was. as it turned out, there was one really close to my apartment.

as we walked up the street towards it, these two young boys were walking in front of us. they kept turning around and looking at us, i guess because i was a foreigner. later, yeo told me that they kept saying to one another, you ask them, no, you ask them. finally in korean they asked yeo if she was a foreigner, and she utterly confused them by responding in english, no, i'm korean.

at the jjimjilbang, we started off by paying just â‚©6,000 each, and then we were each issued a white t-shirt and a pair of white shorts. we split up into the separate changing rooms, and met back upstairs in the actual sauna room. it was a large, open room with a heated floor. there were about fifteen people sleeping or sitting peacefully in massage chairs or on mats on the floor. there were a few large television sets with the volume set low, but no one seemed to be watching them much.

set of from the main room were a few smaller rooms with signs above the doors indicating the temperatures inside. we went inside one of them, which inside looked more like a cave, with a hot stone oven in the center. that was where you could get a really good sweat going.

we spent the early afternoon just resting and talking, going back and forth from the hotter rooms to the main room-temperature one. they had a tiny snack bar, and from it we got some more orange juice for me, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs to snack on.

yeo noticed that they offered massages, although they weren't cheap, â‚©50,000 for one. since neither of us had ever had one before, we figured we should give it a try. it was a sports massage, and in the end i found it to be a bit painful without really providing much benefit. i suppose if i had actually been experiencing muscle pain or something beforehand, maybe it would have helped. to be honest i didn't really feel at all different after it than before, except that my wallet was noticeably lighter. i suppose i'll have to try it again sometime before i can know for sure, and maybe since i was feeling sick in the first place it wasn't the best time to try it.

all in all it was a very relaxing day, i wish i had found out about it and tried it earlier, i would have taken advantage of it much more had i known it was there. it's also open 24 hours a day, so you can even go there overnight, all for that same low price of just â‚©6,000.