The Jones' Korean Adventure

After our DMZ tour, Trent and Emily, and Sam and I headed to a Jimjibang in Seoul to spend the night. What are Jimjibangs, you ask? Well, they're my new favorite thing about Korea! To put it simply, a Jimjibang is a sauna hotel. Here's how it works...a weary traveler enters the Jimjibang, pays 10 bucks, receives a Jimjibang uniform, and free access to all of the Jimjibang amenities. They are thus able to leave the hustle and bustle behind, and enter a small utopia in the middle of the city.

Our Jimjibang had 5 floors, and a basement. The basement held the separate male and female bath and sauna rooms. We're talking every kind of bath imagineable: jade baths, charcoal baths, mugwort baths, massage baths, cold baths, steam baths, waterfall baths, yellow soil baths...you get the idea! I won't say much about this...but here's why the men and women are separate...everybody's naked...and everybody's fine with it. The North American traveler has no choice but to become "fine with it" too...kind of freaky, kind of freeing (enough said).

The first floor of the Jimjibang was the locker room floor. When we walked through the doors we were given a shoe locker and a normal locker for our bags and clothes. No one is allowed to leave the locker room unless they are: a) naked, and heading down to the sauna area, or b) wearing the given "uniform" and heading up to the other floors of the building. The second floor had a restaurant, a snack shop, a large screen tv, bookshelves with tons of books (unfortunately, no English copies available), and massage chairs. We had dinner in the restaurant on this floor, and I have to say that I really enjoyed their bibimbap and seaweed soup. Sam had the bulgogi (a meat dish), which came with rice and lettuce leafs to wrap it in.

On to floor 3 - known as the "entertainment floor". This floor had a workout room, another snack shop, another big TV, internet access rooms, and a PC room (video game room). Floor 4 had tons of cool relaxation rooms...a limestone room (where you could lie on limestone), a pebble room (where you could lie on warm pebbles, or bury yourself in them...I loved it!), an oxygen room (where you could lie down and breath in oxygen-rich air), and a mud-dugout room (where you could lie in a little cave-like tunnel and have a bright, red light shine on you). Notice that most of the rooms involved "lying down"...it was great! The fourth floor also had another big TV, another snackshop, more massage chairs, and some tables and chairs (which came in handy for some fantastic game playing). I have to say that the massage chairs weren't that great. I decided to try one, put my 1000 won in, and then had my back beaten by the chair for 2 minutes, before I'd had enough and had to jump out. Sam was gracious enough to finish off my remaining 8 minutes...and he actually liked it!

On to the fifth floor...the sleeping floor. This floor had a men's sleeping room, a women's sleeping room, and a snore room (which is kind of stupid...even if a person was aware that they were a snorer, why would they choose to go to a room where they knew they'd be kept awake by everyone else's snoring...hmmm). The men's and women's rooms had about 160 beds in each...sort of bunk bed style. The beds were really just mats, some were in little cubbies on the floor, and some were on higher, raised "bunks". They came equipped with a towel-like blanket, and a hard, square pillow. I opted to use another towel-blanket as my pillow, and then slept like a baby in my cubbie until morning. Sam had a harder time sleeping because he chose one of the raised platform bunks, and it was too short for him to completely stretch out. We live and learn! Although floor 5 is the "designated" sleeping floor, the Koreans pretty much sleep anywhere, on all of the floors...very funny to see!

We now know how to travel in Korea in style. Every city has one of these saunas...even Osan. Although I have to say I will NEVER visit the Osan sauna. One thing I don't want to hear while sitting in the baths is, "Teacher, teacher...hi!".

This is Sam in the oxygen room, breathing in the intense oxygen (direct from the source).