Korean Job Discussion Forums

[khyber]

my gym is attached to a bath house...to shower i HAVE TO use it.
I can deal but as an overweight, slightly hairy, tatooed and pierced foreigner, the eyes can be a bit overwhelming at times.

[EFLtrainer]

[eamo]

[Chillin' Villain]

Ha... Funny time to notice this thread.

I'm in the jjimjilbang PC room right now, and just finished walking- sans clothing- through a big police/drunken ajeossi melee. Apparently a scrap broke out in the change room while I was soakin', and the cops were called in. It looked kinda funny, cuz while one cop was there taking drunken abuse from the ajeossi, the other cop was fixing his hair in the huge mirror. Really strange thing to come out of the shower too!

Anyways, I really like my jjimjilbang. I'm here quite a lot, as my girlfriend lives in Incheon and I live in Anyang. Any time we hang out past 10:30 (gf's got a 12:00 curfew-snap!), I've got the option of a 30,000 cab ride home, or a night here.

I believe this is my 158th visit...

[Harpeau]

[OiGirl]

[OiGirl]

[jessiaka]

I've heard stories of the stares they give foreigners that go there in the first place. I'm tattooed and pierced on top of that... uhh too scared to try haha.

[JeJuJitsu]

I don't head to the public baths much, but go to the gym everyday and at first was annoyed with the other guys checking out my junk...but now I just look at them as they take a good look at my stuff, wait for them to look up at my face, then when I have eye contact, I look at their junk and then give an eye-rolling chuckle to signify that "yes, your thingy is very tiny." Oddly, after 6 months of attending the gym at the same time each day, I now almost always have the shower room to myself no matter how crowded the gym is--apparently the Kguys don't like having their weenies laughed at.

[the_beaver]

[ambvalent]

The funniest thing is that I haven't heard anyone refer to bath houses as places to sleep while traveling. Considering I can't usually find a yagwon for less than 30k won while traveling, and jjim jil bangs cost less than 10k, it's a deal that can't be beat for me. I prefer to be social while traveling alone, and I've met quite a few interesting people that way. During my first stay ever in a bath house, I woke up, started chatting with a soldier (a tank commander) and he hung out with us all day. He would have bungee jumped with us, but he was over the weight limit

I think the family atmosphere is awesome, and I like knowing that people go there on the weekend to relax as a family away from HumanFarm (apartment) hell. If I'm alone and no one is talking to me, usually I can distract a child into playing some kind of silly game with me. Also, for the ones that have monopoly boards ("ItaewonLand" in Itaewon does), you can often get a group of Koreans to play with you. I mean, everyone knows monopoly, and it's great for the language barrier. I often bring kyopo or Korean-speaking friends with me, also.

My favorite jjim jil bangs:

The one in ChunCheon(?) (����) by the university drinking street. Look for the Garfield bar, or ask someone where it is, and it's a short walk from there. Has the largest communal sleeping room I've found yet. I fell asleep relatively early and woke up in a room of passed out students. Nothing more attractive than waking up to the ass-kickin breath of a drooling, passed out and soon-to-be hung-over agashi planted 6 inches from your face

Nambu bus terminal in Seoul: Go out exit 3 and it's in the underground of the tall oval-ish building. There's a staircase going down. This isn't the best one out there, but the floor is usually quite clean (not slimy, like the one in ItaewonLand is even after they scrub it). Also, the saunas are nice, the sleeping room is really quiet, and people are nice.

The one by Kyungbook University in Daegu: The number is 952-3000 and the manager speaks English (studied on Rhode Island). 5 floors of bath house madness. Individual sleeping cots which I heavily layer with fresh towels.

I don't know about you guys that feel weird about people looking at your "unit" or the perceived nastiness of soaking in a bath where other people their foul bodies, but I the way I see it, we're all pretty disgusting sacks of bacteria, and whenever you're tinned into a subway car, touching a child whose hands likely have touched all manners of ass and foulness since her/his last washing, you're putting yourself at germ risk. It's unavoidable, for me, in Korea, and being in a bathhouse doesn't give me any extra anxiety about germs.
One thing I can think of that makes me a little uneasy is the occasional encounter with a he's-a-she. I don't understand it completely, whether this is biological or something "more", but sometimes you'll see a man with a very feminine body, typical korean small breasts, and they'll giggle when they see you. The incidence of such encounters seems a lot higher than my perception of the transsexual rate in society, so it's a little odd.

Most staring is minimal in my experience, and when it happens I think the men are just curious. They haven't been taught, like we in western society have, to assume that if you're looking at someone's *beep*, that it means you're gay.

And as far as women go, I've gone with a number of women who really enjoy it. I've never gone with anyone who hated it, because my pre-arrival honest description usually sends the would-bes running. A german friend even told me she was surprised they weren't totally coed, because in germany our baths are coed most days of the week. My girlfriend unfortunately doesn't like them---and won't give me a reason--ah well.


Actually, the most uncomfortable thing for me is when I see another foreigner, because he's trying so hard not to stare at anyone's unit

[Tiger Beer]

[jaganath69]

[sillywilly]

I loved going. I really felt clean after all that exfoliation. Also, seeing all the adjumas nude made me feel better about my body relative to how I normally felt about it in Korea. Clothes can conceal a lot. But recently, back in Canada I saw a report about women getting horrid infections from getting pedicures and foot spas. Apparantly the salons weren't cleaning out the drains and disinfecting the tank regularly enough on the soaking foote-spa thingies and the customers were sometimes getting puss-filled reactions and scars on their legs. Now I'm thinking back to those baths and the relative number of people who soaked themselves in those and am kind of leary. I had more than my feet in those baths. No such reaction as a result but it got me thinking.

[OiGirl]

Ok, today at the bathhouse, I was asked by a group of pre-pubescehent girls:

Do you like chicken?

and

You Meramican?

Who taught the "do you like" + food lesson this week?
Who taught these as conversational gambits when faced with a naked foreigner?