A Korean Bath House- Guest Author-Grandma Bunny

Tracy has asked us to comment on our adventures in Seoul and I would like to begin by saying we enjoyed all of them. We were most impressed with the people and how warm and friendly they were by grabbing a hand of a child, offering candy, gum, a kleenex, and even money. There was a feeling of safety and caring.

Julie read in the guide book that you must experience the baths so she got directions to the closest one which she said was right next door. We set off for it on our last day with directions from the people at Eastern , it was called the Happy Day Spa. After walking for a while, we finally asked at the hotel if they knew where it was and they pointed us to the tall building a block or so down. We got lucky when we entered the building as there was no English lettering telling us we were there, in fact there was no English at all so we had to guess at what we were doing. With a lot of gestures they figured out what we wanted and equiped us with little pink shorts and T shirts to wear in the sauna and 2 hand towels each.. Before we even entered the spa we had to put our shoes in a locker and then were given another locker for our clothes. Other than the sauna it was obvious that we would not need our clothes until we left. The saunas were 4 little buildings like igloos amongst mats with people sleeping in little pink outfits for the women and white outfits for the men. We warmed up there for about 20 minutes then set out to find the steam bath and pools. Donned in our birthday clothes we ventured into the huge room with row upon row of showers with little stools and many people [all women in this section]. There were 3 whirlpools that could hold about 20 people each with different temperatures, individual whirlpools and one big pool that was very cold. We would spend about 3-10 min. in the steam bath and then rinse our selves off to jump in the cold pool which felt wonderful. There were strong cold jets above that you could stand under and they pounded out any aches and pains you might have. After doing this for about 1-2 hours we felt wonderful and decided that we should have discovered this place the first day. It was definitely a place you wouldn't want to miss.

(Note, there are NO photos of this experience:) )