Korean Spa

without a stitch on
in a room full of strangers -
strangely comforting.

Normally being naked in public is the stuff of anxiety dreams, those awful ones wherein you're merrily strolling the aisles at Trader Joe's only to suddenly realize you don't have any clothes on and you're stuck at the far end of the frozen foods, begging a TJ's employee to sell you an ugly Hawaiian shirt. As a veteran of many of such nightmares, I should be a little hinky about public nudity. But I'm not. Not in the least. Especially when it comes to Korean Spas.

Don't know what a Korean Spa is? Not to worry. MamaKu knows, and she's about to tell you:

It's heaven.

No, seriously. A good Korean Spa is like God took a sharp knife and sliced off a little piece of Paradise, and populated it with kindly Korean angels in practical black underwear who want nothing more in life than to get you cleaner and softer and more relaxed than you have EVER been in your ENTIRE life. A good Korean Spa is hot herbal tea and iced cold cucumber water in rooms lined with exotic materials with magical sounding names and curative properties: The Jade Room, The Yellow Clay Room, The Amethyst Room, The Mugwort Room (ok, this last one actually smells a little funny, but supposedly it cleans out your internal organs and gives you nice dreams.)

It is Heaven.

When you go into a Korean Spa you are given a locker key, a towel, a robe, some sandals, and strict instructions to keep your hair up. (Hint for Newbies: the little wrist-twist that holds your locker key is perfect for this purpose.) That is the last time you will see your clothes for hours. You will wear your nice clean robe all the way through the lounge area, where you might pause to have some of the aforementioned tea or water. Thus refreshed, you will enter the main spa area, hang your robe on a hook, and become one of a sea of naked people practicing what is surely the world's best hygiene.

I should note here that Korean Spas are gender-differentiated (men get naked only with men, and women with other gals) but they are still not for the prude-of-heart. Once you drop your robe, male or female, you are going to find yourself strolling around with dozens of people who have the basic equipment you do but in every different size, shape, age, and color you can imagine. You are also likely to see a few scars and tattoos that normally don't enjoy the light of day. It's all out there.

But nobody cares, and that's the beauty of the Korean Spa experience. Everybody's naked, and no one cares ... so long as you keep your hair up, because if you don't, a couple of little old (naked) women will scold you and try to put it back up for you. I know. It happened to me my first time. Never again.

You will take the first of what will be many thorough showers at this point, making sure you are clean enough to take part in the communal cleanse-a-thon.

Then you go for it. In addition to all the nifty rooms, there are hot saunas and cold plunge pools; jacuzzis and pungently scented steams and open showers you visit again and again, to rinse off whatever toxins are leaking out of your pores as a result of all these wonderful places. At a Korean Spa, you can wash and scrub yourself stem to stern - rows of pristine little showers with stools to sit on make this easy - or, as a special treat, hire someone else to do it for you.

That's where the angels come in. Professional Korean bath attendants know their stuff. They wear a uniform of very un-sexy black underwear (think more "Lady Jockey" than "La Perla") because, basically, they work (and work hard) in a never ending stream of warm water. Under such conditions, less is definitely more.

If you choose to receive a Korean Spa treatment after you spend as much time as you like in the main spa area, you are escorted by your own personal angel into a large open room lined with padded plastic tables. This is not your lavender-scented intensely private spa "space" with Enya and Kenny G. drifting through the air. There is no music (unless you think as I do that the Korean language is a inherently musical). The aesthetic can only be described as Early Hospital Morgue - everything lined with tile, and with drains spaced at intervals in the floor. Big industrial trash cans filled with warm water are refilled from plumbers' taps in the wall; wire racks hold gallon jugs with unknown contents and - wait for it - piles of raw cucumbers. (I will get to that part later.)

Bare as the day you were born, you will be prompted to hop up on a plastic table only about three or four feet away from other naked people on other plastic tables. But you will not care, because your eyes will close and, honest to God, you will immediately revert to infancy. Your new Mama in black bra and panties will take a bucket and slosh warm water all over you before donning a pair of loofah mitts (fresh out of the package) and getting to work making sure you are as clean and soft as the proverbial baby's bottom. All of you. Even that selfsame bottom. From your neck to your armpits to your back and breasts (boobies are apparently just another appendage to be scrubbed, in the world of the Korean Spa) all the way down through your nether regions to the space between each and every, believe me here, toe ... you will be scrubbed to within an inch of your life. But kindly. Your attendant will gently lift each limb and body part, work methodically through every crack and crevice, and tap you gently before rolling you, with all the strong assurance of a practiced parent, from front to back to side to side.

(If you manage to open your eyes through the sheer bliss of this experience, you will see literal sheets of your own skin rolling off your body like nasty gray cigarette papers. I recommend keeping your eyes shut. The bath attendants will deal with with your dermatological detritus without your needing to look at it, and that is best for everyone, I think.)

When she is done, your Korean angel-mama will stand you up and send you off - yet again - to shower off the scrub. Take note: When you get back, she will check to make sure you have not left a grain of exfoliant to interfere with the rest of the process. Your ears will be flapped up and down, your hairline inspected, and, depending on the spa and the authenticity of the treatment, you may or may not have a middle-aged woman run her finger up the cleft between your buttocks. If she finds so much as a speck of soap, grit, or exfoliated skin there, she will send you back to try again.

Try to get it right the first time.

Then comes the good part - the massage.

How can I describe this? Having lurked at the bottom of the spinal gene pool for almost all of my life (lordosis, stenosis, scoliosis, degenerative discs - I've seen it all) I have experienced just about every therapy, chiropractic, and medical treatment out there. Nothing, but nothing, equals the ability of an experienced 4-foot-nine-inch Asian woman who is literally straddling your prone body to figure out and cure what ails you. These ladies take muscular tension as a personal affront; during one Korean Spa visit in LA the 50-something woman taking care of me grabbed hold of one arm, lifted it above my head, and hissed right out loud. One of her colleagues came over to see what was the matter, and before I knew it, the two of them had, I am convinced, dislocated and reinserted my shoulder. Not that I was really aware. It didn't really hurt - there was just a flurry of limbs and some very loud pops, and then my lady was patting me with a sweet mixture of consolation and admonition.

"Too much stress," she chided me. "You cut it out."

Then she continued to massage my problematic left trapezoid with the same powerful, assured strokes that had basically jellified the rest of my body, and all I could do was mentally agree: "Yes, Angel-Mama, I will stop gripping the steering wheel so tight. I will chill on the keyboard. I will stop wagging my finger at drivers who cut me off on the 101. I will do anything you ask, just please ... don't ... stop."

And she didn't, until I was drooling all over the towel beneath my head and pretty sure that the numbness that had been plaguing my left pinkie was ... gone.

Then, with one of those deft taps, she flipped me over and disappeared. This is another thing American spa-goers need to understand. Korean bath attendants aren't like the white-t-shirted Karmas and Larses of the American spa experience. They don't feel obliged to have one hand comfortingly on you at all times. In fact, at some points during your hour-long treatment, they will disappear altogether, leaving you (warm enough and swaddled in towels) all alone on your plastic table in the middle of the big tile room. (Rest assured, Newbies. They are just off making things even better, if that is possible.)

Toward the latter half of your Korean Spa treatment, your attendant will leave you alone for a while, whisk a fresh cucumber out of the stash on the rack behind her, grate it (you will hear this) right in the vicinity of your head, and proceed to apply the resultant moist, fragrant slop to your cheeks, foreheads, chin, nose, and jawline. You will at this point think you have recached the apex of your Korean Spa experience, because shredded raw cucumber on your face feels - and smells - sooooooooooooooooooooo good.

But you have not. Ultimate bliss is reserved for the shampoo and scalp rub that follows and will, as one friend of mine once put it, leave you feeling as if your hair has never been so wet nor so richly full of mysteriously healthy, good-smelling unguents in its life.

Ah. This blog post has gone on too long, the way I wish all my visits to Korean Spas would. It's been a few years since an old friend treated me to my first Korean Spa experience, and only a few days since I did likewise to a more recent acquaintance, who left our joint appointment in San Francisco beaming like a religious convert. We're all hooked now - addicts of a sort. We know the sweet satisfaction of being THAT clean, of smelling THAT good, of having milk-rinsed skin so soft and muscles so relaxed that it takes days - literally - for the glow to wear off.

We don't have a Korean Spa in my hometown of Santa Barbara, but I wish like anything we did. If I had money to spend on setting up a business, it would be, hands-down, an authentic Korean Spa, with minimalist decor and wise, practiced ladies in black underwear to take care of us all and remind us that, in a world where - truly - we control so little, we can at least take care of each other. Naked and without judgement, just doing our best to be clean and happy.

Kind of like Heaven.