voluntary nudity in december

im just warning you - nakedness is discussed in this passage, so if you dont want to read feel free to not read. hehe.

so this weekend i went with my coworker yanny to busan and we decided to save money we would stay in a 짐질벙 which is one of the notorious bathhouses that maybe you have heard about. so actually i went to a jimjillbang before with my bosses family and i was scared to death! i thought i was just going to be wondering around a building completely naked! oh my gosh! but actually it was really cool. anyways, so yanny has been wanting to take me to one of these since i came here. the bathhouse that is. anyways, so you go there and you pay $10 - and thats expensive! hahaha....and this is our order of operations for the evening - when you arrive you get a locker for your shoes and your belongings. they give you an outifit that everyone is wearing and some towels. then you just strip down and go upstairs to the bathhouse.(woman only - though in japan there are guy girl bathing adn most koreans think that is ludacris.haha) now there are showers all over the place and then there are like what look like vanitys - mirror and shelf and a shower head that you can take off and use however - and stools. you you just sit on the stool and scrub your body and wash yourself and stare at yourself in the mirror. sounds like fun eh? well we shower off and then there are 5 different like hot tubs - but bigger - each one a different temperature. some have massagers and some don't. so just go and lounge about in the hot tub completely naked. hehe! and there are tiny kids running around, old woman, young woman - everyone - and everyone is naked and it just felt so nice. even as a foreigner i wasn't really stared at which was great! at one point a woman stayed in the water too long and was dragged out by about 10 other naked woman and then put cold water all over her. hahaha. i mean she was ok. thats why its ok to laugh. um, i think. maybe not. hahaha...anyways. the best part -----so we are just walking around, and we take a dip in one pool adn then another. and then there is another pool out on the balcony!!! and its so hot we can't even get in it! but its out on this balcony and you can see the bridge - in my pics on facebook. and so we just stand up and im like - dude, were naked. this is normal for yanny. haha.. so we yell we are naked! and its december! and we are at the beach! and we are outside! it was the coolest thing! hahaha!!!! so we enjoyed that for sometime.hahahahah and i could think of about 3 or 4 other girls who would love that chance! so come to korea and its on me! :) so then i just start sharing with yanny all these stories of nakedness - always when you aren't supposed to be naked. interesting cultural study i think. nakedness, and view of sex adn all that jazz. kate did you ever do a paper like that? i would liek to read it.

stacy, you can remove that look of disgust from your face. hehehe....now you can and just enjoy the idea of jimjilbang. :) well after we lounge and bath we go back ot our lockers and put on our little outfits adn we go up 2 floors to the jimjil rooms - saunas! a hot room with some ginger sent. its made out of mud and looks like a hut and is abotu 150 degrees. we go there and sweat and then there are other rooms with different scents - herbal remedies - and different temps. then there is is a hot stone room, where you can lay on tiny stones on the floor. there is a hot salt room where its just salt rocks and you lay on them and sweat - bc yanny teacher says you are being cooked like kimchi. hehe. there is an ice room. a room of just little balls to lay on. there are computers to use. playgrounds to play on. tvs everywhere, restaurant, little snack shops. you can get scrubbed for like 15$, massaged for $20, i mean really anything. its like a spa but soo cheap! and there are rooms for sleeping on the floor of course but it was fine bc the floor is heated. (i actualy sleep on the floor in my apt because i relly do like it) and then we woke up had breakfast of kimchi soup, seaweed and rice. then we went back to all the rooms again. showered again and left well, whenever we wanted to. isnt that awesome? for $10..i mean we paid 5$ for breakfast. and these are everywhere in korea! so it is my new favorite place! yanny goes like every weekend to read and listen to music and relax. oh man. how awesome! so that was the highlight of my weekend. though it was just a great weekend in general. that was definitely awesome.