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Nice and sweaty, that's how I like it. But it's not just the sweat and heat. Sure, I dig being warm--always have (ask my childhood friends about my wide, sweaty smiles and their miserable heatstrokes on our roadtrips). But it's the medicine and art and community of the experience. It's the Korean sauna. These people spend 5 bucks to get into a 24-hour spa that would make our spas look like gas stations. And none but the wealthy enter ours. Here, every housewife, old lady, teenager, middle-aged couple, or businessman is welcome and a likely visitor. And, of course, the rare Meeguk (their name for us strange whities with big round eyes). I love it at these places. It's the locals-only sensation that pleases me the most. I avoid KFCs, McDonald's, and anything else remotely American here. Those aspects of my culture I left behind on purpose and deliberately avoided when home. No, I came here to hang with the locals, as much as they'd let me. To drop my clothes and inhibitions and join all the rank and file of women at their seated showers, scrubbing themselves raw, and at their mineral pools, chatting, talking, and (still) scrubbing. It's the 24-hour, 5-buck wellness of it all that pleases me and feeds my dream of "other" ways to be well--of preventive and alternative medicine. Of taking care of the body and mind before they're in a heap about mid-age. I mean, people here hang out at these places as much as the movie theaters. They squat in little mushroom caves studded with healing stones (jade, amethyst, turquoise, etc), clay, charcoal (the purifier), cedar, gold even. And when they tire of sweating, they sip their barley water and talk or sleep or read. Today in my favorite hut, with a giant stone flower of jade on the amethyst ceiling, I stretched my tight, sore limbs, unafraid of their tearing or catching. I was like jelly, and felt like I was being cleaned as sweat trickled out of every pore. And suddenly it dawned on me, as it has many times before: there is a GIANT branch of wellness I've long ignored--REST. Yes, believe it or not, Americans (me especially), there's another way to sweat and be well that ain't on a treadmill or steep mountain trail. No, these people know how to be well just sitting down. At that thought (and every time I go to the pools, watching the beautiful bodies of women with all their shapes and colors and textures and ages--none of them like the damn magazines), I wanted to drag every person I know with body issues (that's a lot of people) into that spa. "Hey!" I'd holler, smiling. "Get naked! Walk around with these old people and see what bodies really look like. Scrub yourself raw, loving every bit of flesh, unafraid of random glances from foggy mirrors. And then go put on a t-shirt and shorts and go sweat in a cave of jewels, purifying, purifying." Sure, there's mountains to climb. And chances are, I'm going to climb them. But not today. Today they're for somebody else. This body's content to just sit cross-legged and sweat and feel all fleshy and lovely. And to be unafraid. Unafraid to relax. At home, I avoided "relax" with a competency that was all too easy. We all do at times. For me, it's in part because I've come to understand "relax" in American-only terms, terms I'm not comfortable with all the time: ie, sit in front of a moving screen until your mind is spent and your body tight and tired. Relaxation is all about channel surfing. Sure, the TV provides a whole medium for art, an amazing extension for human expression. But mostly it's just an overused distraction. A distraction from living, loving, and doing some of our OWN creating. But here, despite the fact I've never seen a people more committed to entertainment technology (and that's saying something, being from the USA), old ways still attract people, even the young. For now. For now, tradition coexists with the new, loud tech culture. Since the technology came so suddenly to this new country, there wasn't time yet to kill all the other folkways. So the two teeter in this fascinating balance, at least for the time being. The old woman in rags selling fish at the market, wearing a shiny cell phone on a cord around her neck. The big markets with squatting women and drying seaweed just below a computer game room filled with the youth. But I fear the intrusion of the new, insomuch as it eclipses the old. So I search out old tea rooms, and calligraphy shops with big brushes, and age-old herb shops filling the entire street with smells of crushed bones and plants. Covered in sweat, Scott and I muse on opening a spa back in the states. But a spa for people, not just for the wealthy. I want the old and sick and immobile to feel a little better in their bodies. To age, but not cripple. Like the wisened old women here, with smiling shrunked faces, still bending and sitting and hiking, at any age. Get Naked, ck [2003-02-21]
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