Now that I'm a Kept Woman I keep wondering about what I'll do with all this spare time I allegedly have. Massage? Day Spa? Cooking Classes?
A couple of years ago my friend Melissa arranged for me and another friend, Ann, to go to a Korean Bath House. I blogged about it at the time so if you're interested in reading, go right ahead. I just read it again and crossed Korean Bath House off my list of things I might do and instead wrote "floss my teeth."
PART ONE:
This Friday night I'm flying up to Sydney for the weekend with a couple of
girlfriends. We're going to stay in Darling Harbour and do some shopping
but generally just enjoy a few days without having to hear the words
"Muuuuummmmmm can you wipe my bottom?"
My friend Melissa called me tonight to let me know that we've booked our
hotel, and also to check if I'm ready for the Korean Bath House experience,
which we're scheduled to have on Saturday morning. I'm not sure how one
prepares for the Korean Bath House experience, and if anyone out there has some
advice I'd like to hear it.
Apparently it all starts with getting naked. The men and women are
separated, but the spa-addicted Personal Assistants with rock-hard buns are
chucked in with the menopausal Weight Watchers and the stretch-marked within an
inch of their lives Working Mothers. If you've got any dignity you might
as well leave it in your locker. Along with the spectacles that correct
your poor eyesight. Because, really, you don't need to see someone else's
wobbly bits. And you don't need to see that they're checking out yours.
Apparently, and this is what my Korean Bathed friend Helen told me, there
are little Korean women who lay you out flat on a table and then scrub your
dead skin off with Brilo-pads until they reach bone. They scrub you ALL OVER. Yes. You
get up from the table and see that you have indeed shed your skin, and yes,
it's definitely dead. There's soaking in a large warm pool involved;
can't remember if this is before or after the scrub (Maybe it's both). I
can recall that it's a communal warm pool. Again, try not to make eye
contact. And no giggling.
I called Helen to ask her if I was going to feel uncomfortable with the
whole walking around in a room full of naked strangers thing. She told me
that, compared with some of the other visitors to the Baths, I was in pretty
good shape and had nothing to be ashamed of (I should say, at this point, that
Helen hasn't seen me naked since we were, like, three year olds, so she's
completely making this up... I wouldn't show her my post-childbearing naked
body right now because she's pregnant with her first baby and the shock of What
Can Happen might kill her). She said she saw (through blurred,
unspectacled vision) a generously-proportioned older woman being scrubbed by
two Korean ladies... one would do the scrubbing while the other moved bits and
separated folds... eeww. I'm pretty sure my scrubbing will be a
one-Korean lady affair. God I hope so.
Then there's a massage, and the little Korean ladies leap up onto the table
and then walk all over you (you're lying face-down) as they hold onto a beam on
the roof to steady themselves. Here's the part where I'll be hoping she
doesn't dig a heel into my large intestine and squeeze out a little fart.
I'm sorry, I know that massages are supposed to be relaxing, but I'm pretty
sure my preoccupation with this particular form of humiliation in the public domain
will keep me alert and on-guard. Again, it's going to be all about
stifling giggles.
Now that I think about it, I'm not really sure why I signed up for
this. When Mel asked me if I was 'ready' for the Korean Bath I did a
quick stat check - hairy legs? Hideously unkempt bikini line? Butch
underarm stubble? If I had time to squeeze in a quick tummy-tuck and
bust-lift by Saturday morning I could probably answer that question with a
little more certainty. No, I have to say I'm not at all prepared for my
Korean Bath. And it will almost certainly take some time to recover from
my Korean Bath. I have it on good authority that I'll feel AMAZING
afterwards... all glowing and peaceful and at one with the universe or some
such malarky. I can get that from a block of good chocolate.
No, I think this Korean Bath experience is one for the Things To Do Before
You Die list. And in completing this particular task I might be able to
tick off a couple of other things on that very same list:
1. Walk naked through a room full of other naked people without staring at
their saggy bits.
2. Laugh so hard at yourself that the champagne comes out through your nose.
PART TWO: BATHED
When I emerged, two hours later, the receptionist asked me what I thought of
the Korean Ginseng Bath House Experience. I looked at her through tired
eyes, and said "that was weird."
Perhaps not my most poetic response, and possibly not one that she was used to
hearing. But then, how best to describe those two hours? All I
could think was: my skin is smooth, my back is sore, and I need to blog about
this as soon as possible.
I went to the Crest Hotel in Kings Cross - a part of Sydney best known for
its XXXX-rated clubs and raunchy end-of-footy-season send-offs. The Crest
Hotel is looking a little, well, forlorn. I don't know its history, but
if I'd been in Kings Cross for 30-odd years my paintwork would be peeling and
my carpets would need a good shampoo, too***. The Bath House is located on
the fourth floor. You come out of the elevators and you can smell
patchouli, which seems to be the International Olfactory Symbol for Alternative
Medicine. After you've paid for your treatment, you are given a numbered
locker key, your green brillo-pads, and directed to the change rooms - women at
one end of the hall, men at the other. We three girls - Melissa, Ann
& Me - wandered to the right end and went in search of our lockers. A
smallish room with tall thin lockers, each one containing a fresh towel and a
light-weight cotton robe. Instructions on the inside of the door told us
to get undressed, leave all our belongings in the locker, and to take our towel
and brillo-pads with us The key went around our wrists.
The locker room is full of women in various states of undress, and either
about to be bathed, or already bathed. Everyone was looking furiously at
the ground or into their lockers, but your peripheral vision comes into its own
and you can see bare bottoms everywhere. I had my back to Melissa and
Ann, and I missed the moment when Ann, who'd been dreading the whole
experience, dead-panned "I'm not enjoying this" and Melissa started
giggling. She was still giggling as we filed out of the change room and
into the short corridor that separates the locker room from the shower
room. There's a hanging rack there to put your robes on - yes, the robes
you had been wearing for ten seconds. Why do they give you a robe?
The corridor opens into the shower room - a big room lined with mirrors
that, if you're sitting on the little plastic stools in front of them, are at
head height. But since you and everyone else is standing, you get to see
lots of bottoms. All angles. Mel was still giggling as we walked
over to a shower each and rinsed off. You have to do this before you
climb into the ginseng bath. The showers are the hand-held kind, and
there are wall-mounted soap dispensers. Some people sat on the stools and
took their time, but we hosed off pretty quickly and went to the bath.
It's quite strange walking around in a room full of naked women.
There's no way you can not look
because, try as you might, your peripheral vision is picking up most of what's
going on. The last time I was naked in a room full of people was when I
was in hospital in the throes of labour - standing in a shower, PJ spraying hot
water on my back, with the midwives and doctor discussing how far along I was,
while I groaned and made sounds that were later described as 'horsey'.
You don't care about nakedness during childbirth. Nor, apparently,
neighing. Of course it's completely different when everyone else is
naked, too. Your mind skips from 'gosh, her bum is much bigger than mine'
to 'golly, I remember when my tits were that perky.' But mostly you're
just trying to act nonchalant. In a room full of naked women it's best to
appear indifferent.
(I have it on good authority that, in the men's bath, the illusion of
indifference is easily betrayed by that well-known International Symbol for
Really Rather Interested, Actually.)
The first bath is the Ginseng Bath - the water was warm, and mostly
still. There seemed to be a spa-jet on one side, but there were three
women right in front of it who never moved so I didn't get to find out if there
was a massage to be had already. The water smelled slightly of
something - ginseng, I guess - and it was nice and relaxing. The sides of
the bath were high enough to warrant a couple of steps to climb into the
bath. Like getting out of a car in a short skirt, you learned very
quickly to keep your legs together. And with the water nice and still
there was no froth-and-bubbles to hide under, so you learned very quickly to
look people straight in the eye and nowhere else.
So I was in a room full of naked people and was thinking to myself that some
women have lots more (and lots less) pubic hair than me. Yep, that was
what I was thinking. PJ wanted to know my impression of different boobs,
but they didn't really catch my attention quite as startlingly as the
extraordinarily different pubic hair. While Melissa, Ann and I tried very
hard not to look, we all talked later about the tall, athletic woman whose
bikini line had clearly never been introduced to the wonders of waxing.
Crikey. Anyway, moving on.
There are three baths in this room, all in a row. The middle bath was
hot water (really just warm) and the last one was cold. You can get in
and out of them whenever you want. They're not just baths, they're
holding tanks. You sit there and soak and go pruny while you wait for
someone to come and call out your locker number to tell you that you're
Next.
(There are also two saunas in this room - one wet and one dry. We went
into the wet one, and sat our bare asses down on the wooden seats. I
would really have liked to have been sitting on a towel.)
Oh wow, I just remembered the guy we saw. I'm sure it was a bloke. He
walked through the bath room, wearing his bathrobe and a towel wrapped in a
Joan Collins turban around his head and straight into one of the saunas.
Melissa saw him too. His arms and legs were hairless but his face was
very masculine and his eyebrows were very bushy. The fact that he was
wearing a bathrobe (when the rest of us were butt naked) was, to me, sure
evidence that he had something to hide. I was quite shocked. There
was an attendant standing nearby and I called her over and told her that I
thought I had seen a man. He came out of the sauna at that moment, and
she looked at him then turned to me and said "oh, no, that's a woman,
she's one of our regulars." Well, if she wasn't a bloke that day I'm
pretty sure she was at some stage in her life. If you can't obey the
signs (the ones that say "nudity is a pre-requisite") then I don't
think you should be allowed in, no matter what your particular situation.
But that's just my opinion.
After about an hour spent in the various baths, I was summoned to the
Massage Room. I climbed out of the bath and followed my little Korean
lady in her black Bonds bra-top and boy-briefs past the showers and into
another room. There were about twenty red vinyl-covered massage tables,
most of them with naked bodies on them, relaxed and covered with oils and
towels while the masseurs worked their magic. I was directed to an empty
table and told to "lie down, please, on your back".
The floor is tiled, and completely wet. The beds are all quite close
together; I was splashed a few times with the spray off someone else's
back as their masseur slapped their skin with cupped hands. The room was
too bright; fluorescent light globes took away any shred of dignity you thought
you may have had left. The room looked like a morgue - all those naked
bodies, supine and silent on their red autopsy benches. The ambiance
would have been much improved if they would swap the fluoro lights for halogens
with dimmer switches.
I handed my masseur my brillo-pads (they are actually little square pockets,
just big enough to cover the masseur's small hands) and lay on the bed.
For the next fifteen minutes or so she scrubbed my body from between my toes up
to behind my ears. She rinsed me off with a bucket of warm water and then
asked me to roll onto my front. After she'd scrubbed my back she asked me
to lie on my side, rinse, roll over, scrub, rinse again. The red vinyl
was incredibly slippery. The beds are not particularly wide, and I was
very conscious of the ceramic tiled floor beneath me. I wondered more
than once what it would be like to slip off the side and into the puddle of
warm water and dead skin cells that were collecting on the floor.
Ewww.
She was a very efficient scrubber. I saw lots of dead skin - certainly
a lot more than I thought I would have. She was very quick, and gave my
bare nipples exactly the same level of attention as my shoulders and
feet. When she was scrubbing my buttocks and the tops of my legs she
managed to slip her brillo-covered hands right there. I'm telling you this so that, if you ever
find yourself at the Ginseng Bath House, you won’t be so surprised.
I can't remember what came next. I know that I was covered in oil at
one point, but there was another time when I was also covered in honey.
She had wrapped a rolled up tea towel around my face, looping it around my chin
and tying it at the top of my head. She got a handful of grated cucumber
and sprinkled it all over my face (the tea towel stopping it from sliding off
and collecting in my ears) and then proceeded to pour warm honey all over my
body. She massaged me from head to toe, and then told me to flip over so
she could do my back. This was a very nice massage - her hands were
incredibly strong and found all the stiff muscles. At one point she must
have hit a sweet spot and I groaned loud enough for her to ask "too much
for you? too much?" and so she backed off a little.
After another couple of buckets of warm water she told me to lie on my front
and draped warm, wet towels over my whole body. All of a sudden I could
feel her climbing up onto the table with me, and then she was sitting on my
bottom, leaning her body weight forward onto her hands which were kneading the
muscles and skin on my shoulders and upper back. And then she put one
foot, then the other onto my bottom and stood up. I have no idea how she
was balancing there; the towels prevented her from slipping off, but there was
no beam above her that she could hold onto. So I lay very still and tried
not to make any sudden movements that would surely send her plummeting to her
doom, or at the very least into the soupy mix of dead skin, honey and warm
water on the floor.
She stood on my bottom for a while, and I pictured her walking on the spot,
or kneading my buttocks the way a cat paws at deep pile carpet. I'd taken
the advice of one of the signs on the wall that said to drink lots of water to
replace body fluids while in the Bath House, and my bladder was getting
increasingly nervous at the prospect of having to hang onto four cups of water
whilst being trodden on by a suddenly very heavy little Korean lady.
She walked up my back, her feet splayed out sideways from my spine, her
heels digging into the middle of my back. I wondered if she might
inadvertently snap one of my ribs. But mostly it felt fantastic.
Obviously a very strong massage, but a good one. When she climbed off she
took the towels with her, then spent the next few minutes slapping me all over
with cupped hands. I've had massages in the past where the masseur has
used a technique to release toxins, and I think this is what she was doing with
all the slapping. It felt great, and afterwards when I felt a bit crampy
in my stomach I realised that it had been very effective.
And then suddenly it was over. She'd washed me off one more time and
then said "OK, all finished now" and helped me to sit up. I
went out to the shower room and rinsed off one more time, then to find my
bathrobe (which I didn't bother putting on) and back to my locker. I
changed into my clothes and went to the toilet and then wandered out to the
lobby and told the girl that it had been weird.
I don't think I'd do it again. It was definitely an experience, and I
think I would recommend it to anyone who liked massages and who thought they
could be comfortable in that sort of environment (Ann said later that she had
enjoyed it, despite earlier misgivings). My only criticism is that the
whole place is in dire need of a face lift. I don't know how long the
Baths have been opened for, but the decor was very tired and if you looked
closely you could find lots of little maintenance jobs that needed doing; paint
peeling, carpets thinning, tiles missing and colours fading. I went to a
Spa in New York last year that was absolutely pristine; it's quite probably
that the Ginseng Bath House is meeting all of the requirements of the Health
Department for cleanliness and hygiene, but I couldn't help wondering why they
didn't spend some money upgrading all the fixtures and fittings to make the
place look fresh. I would definitely have a Korean massage again, but
I'll look around and see if I can have it done somewhere else.
(That said, there seemed to be a lot of Bathers who knew their way around,
as though they had been many times before and were quite comfortable with the
decor... could be I was spoiled by my New York spa experience.)
Two days later and my skin feels fantastic, my muscles are a little sore but
in a good way, and the skin between my butt-cheeks has never been so soft and
supple. For $100 it was an interesting education - I learned how to get
in and out of a swimming pool without flashing the people already in there; I
learned that a very tiny percentage of Bathers spent the same amount of time as
I did preparing their bikini lines for a public outing; and that honey, when
mixed with oil and warm water, makes for a delicious and not at all sticky
massage. Oh, and that everyone's boobs, no matter how they look when a
person is standing up, tend to disappear when that person is lying on their
back - either because they're so small that they just flatten out, or so large
that they fall off the sides and into the armpits. Like mine do.
*** The Ginseng Korean Bath House is getting an extreme makeover and will reopen in April 2008! The whole Crest Hotel is being upgraded and reopening as 'The Chifley' and although the location of the building hasn't changed, they're now saying they're in Potts Point, and not Kings Cross. Even though they're right near Kings Cross Station.
I think this makeover is worth mentioning because the decor was one of the key reasons I had decided I would rather floss my teeth than go back there.
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