My First Korean Scrub Down

Koreans love sauna culture. There are all kinds of saunas all over the place, and people go with their friends and families, and it's relaxing and awesome. I have previously written about Spaland, a heavenly spa in Busan, but there was one stone that remained unturned. Until last week.

Kat and I got our first Korean scrub down. It kind of felt like a rite of passage. And let me just say that after that scrub down, I was LITERALLY the most clean I have been in my entire 25 years of being alive. It was quite the experience.

Basically, for $20, you can become a completely new human being. Here is the process:
1. You are naked
2. You soak in the tubs for a while
3. When it's time, your Korean spa woman comes and finds you and lays you down on a waterproof (and very slippery) bed
4. The scrubbing begins. And I truly mean scrubbing. This is not a light exfoliation. The women wear these plastic glove thingies, which I would say were distinctly reminiscent of those plastic dish scrubbers. You know the ones:

5. They GO AT IT so it's borderline painful, but they move all over your body so it doesn't get too sore in one spot
6. You are put in a variety of positions which remove any sense of dignity that you may have ever had in your life
7. They scrub EVERY. SINGLE. INCH. Seriously. The woman who had the misfortune of doing my scrub down knows me better than pretty much everyone in the world
8. After 20ish minutes of that, they soap you down, dump water on you, and you go to shower off pretty much your entire epidermis

I was a-okay with being naked and getting scrubbed by a random woman. But I was NOT prepared to feel like the world's filthiest animal. For Koreans, the scrubbing is a normal/consistent part of life so there isn't a ton of work to be done. But apparently westerners have absolutely no concept of how to wash properly. So I was essentially 25 years late on getting rid of my grime.

Me seeing what was getting scrubbed off:

Me when making eye contact with the woman scrubbing me:

If I could have spoken Korean I would have been like "I SHOWER EVERY DAY I SWEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Instead, the woman and I shared many awkward laughs and I sported an apologetic face the entire way through. I was glad to have Kat laying on the slab right next to me so we could share in being the foreigner spectacles that we are, and also confirm that yes, they were scrubbing EVERYWHERE.

And I gotta say, I feel HELLA clean. So clean that my tattoos even feel new! And my skin has never been softer!

Would I do it again? MOST DEFINITELY!