Two of my favorite things to do in Korea share the same name: Bang.
Noraebangs are karaoke rooms and jimjilbangs are combination saunas and public bathhouses. In the noraebang, they charge by the hour and the rooms are small. Couches line the walls with a big screen T.V. on one end so no matter how blurred your vision is you can still read the lyrics.
In my set, everyone’s a star. We fight over the two microphones. I rarely sang karaoke in the States. But in a noraebang it’s different. In a noraebang no one’s watching, everyone is either dancing or singing along. There’s always soju (Korean rice wine) but if for some reason there isn’t any soju, there’s always beer.
After nights like these we hurt. We’re swollen and bruised. Luckily, the Koreans like their good times as much as we do, particularly the men. In order to stay functioning they need to detoxify their systems. Enter the jimjilbangs: where Korean men and women soak, relax, and gain peace of mind.
Jimjilbangs are as pervasive in Korean culture as drinking. The one I frequent is in the basement of the towering apartment building across the street from where I live, but it seems like there is one on every street. Many are open 24 hours and travelers seek them out as cheap places to stay.
It goes like this: I walk in the door, remove my shoes and place them in a locker. Then I pay about three dollars and walk into another room. There I give a man my key for my shoe locker and he gives me another key for a clothes locker. Then I completely undress and put the key, which is connected to a plastic band, around my wrist. Again I go through a set of doors into a room where there are three circular stone tubs, each holding water of different temperature, all hot—beyond those, a cold pool of temperature similar to a mountain stream in Spring.
Water is constantly flowing into these pools. But they aren’t fountains, because the water isn’t recycled. Next to the cold pool are two sauna rooms—one dry heat with wooden benches, the other a hot mist with a quartz-type mineral lining the walls. This is where we get the alcohol out.
The part I enjoy the most is a stall where you stand in knee high water and hit a button on the wall. From the ceiling a nozzle sprays a stream of water three inches thick with enough pressure to work out muscle knots, which is perfect for exorcising a day of screaming kindergarten kids.
On the other side of the room there are stations where men sit and scrub their skin with abrasive towels. They help each other remove layers in one sitting, a kind of self-induced shedding. We just got a new teacher at work, from Idaho. He had one of the Korean men who works at our school scrub him. They said they made skin-noodles from his arms. I’m staying away from that.
The sauna rooms are extremely hot. They have been part of Korean culture for hundreds of years and the Korean people can take the heat. In order to stay in for any real amount of time and take my mind off the heat I’m forced to recite poetry.
When I’ve had enough of jumping from room to pool to room, I sit by the tubs and listen to the water pouring into them. I love the sound of water and I do my best thinking here.
People might think it strange—a bunch of nude men and boys, strangers, jumping in and out of pools together. But I understand why the men enjoy it. Most of them live in small spaces, have families and don’t get much time to themselves. Here not many of them talk. They listen to the water and let the heat help work out problems in their bodies. Plus, they like to drink, a lot, and jimjilbangs are the best hangover cure in the world.
Me, I always feel better afterward—clean, relaxed, and at peace. Ready for another night of singing.
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