I’ve discovered a wonderful new element to my life in Korea. It simplifies traveling so much and makes it much much cheaper and less worrisome when I travel around. It’s called the chinshilbang. Every large city has one or more. I had heard about the chinshilbang for quite a while before I actually saw one. It appears to be a relatively new phenomena in Korea, only starting in the last 5 years or so. It is a mixture between a bathhouse and a hotel. Here’s how it works. You pay your fee at the front desk, somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 won (about $3.50-$7.50). There they give you a T-shirt and shorts with their logo on it, a kind of uniform. Then you go to your floor, men to the 4th floor women to the 2nd floor. Before you step in you must take off your shoes. Then you chose a shoe locker and lock your shoes up. Often that shoe locker also is the key to a clothes locker. You undress and go into the sauna. Before you walk in there is a huge stack of clean towels. You can take as many as you want. If you want to take some in the sauna with you, that’s OK too. In the sauna, it’s a traditional bath house like you might find in Japan or other places in Korea. It might be similar to a fancy spa in the US except there are many more pools and rooms you can go into. Also it is decorated in lavishly bad taste. That’s important. Think Elvis paintings on black velvet. Often the walls and pillars are lined with semiprecious cut stones and there are murals of nature scenes and a few naked women thrown in there (in the men’s area, anyway.) Along the sides there are many showers some where you can sit and some where you can stand. Toothpaste is always provided free and from 3 or 4 large communal tubes. There are usually 4 or 5 different pools you can go into, each at a different temperature. Sometimes there is a herb or tea pool where the water is a smoky color because of a big container of herbs soaking there. There are usually 4 or 5 different sweat rooms with the real time temperature posted in bright red digital numerals outside. Some of them are very very hot and some are just hot. Some of the pools have fountains or columns of sprays that you can give yourself a massage. There is always at least one cold pool where you can cool off quickly. Some of the pools are long enough that you can swim about 10 –15 meters if you want to. I love the spa and can spend more than an hour there just playing in the water, moving from hot to cold, messing with my body’s thermal regulator and feeling the buzz that that causes. Getting a kind of natural high from that. When you are done with the sauna you have the option of going to the chinshilbang. Before you go down you put on your uniform.
It seems to be some sort of convention that the men’s sauna is always above the chinshilbang and the womens’s is below. I walked down from the 4th to the 3rd floor and saw a huge room with many people sprawled out on the floor all wearing the same outfits. At first it’s alarming. It looks like a mass genocide has taken place and all the bodies are sprawled in many positions around the floor. You jerk your head this way and that and get ready to run for cover. Then you notice that everyone is still breathing and it’s OK. The floor is a hard stone floor and when you first step on it you are surprised because it is hot. This is the Korean way of heating a room. They heat the floor. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Heat rises, so by heating the floor you are heating the entire room. It feels nice and toasty walking in your bare feet on the heated floors. Looking around you see that along the walls there are more rooms. They look like hot air sauna’s but actually they are sleeping rooms. If you go inside you will see more people sleeping. Each room’s floor is heated to a different temperature. Some of them are so hot it is amazing that anyone can lay down let alone sleep. I laid down on a medium temperature floor and after about 2 minutes I felt like a pancake in a frying pan. And, oh yes, there is a cold room where you can go and cool off or sleep if you are feeling suicidal, the temperature is –14 C.
The strange thing about it is that all these people don’t seem to mind sleeping on a rock hard floor. There are no pads or anything, but there is a kind of pillow. A Korean pillow. It’s a rectangular block of wood about 6 inches high with the top side carved out a little into a concave shape. There you rest your weary head. It took me some getting used to but I found that after about 10 minutes I was able to sleep for a while. Of course it was not the same kind of sleep that I get in my nice cozy bed. This was a sleep where I woke up about 50 times during the night for a variety of reasons, the floor was pressing too hard on my bones or ….the guy next to me was snoring. Of course if you get 50 –100 people in a room there are bound to be some serious snorers. Hey , it’s all part of the chinshilbang experience. And if you don’t like the room where you are, you can always explore and find another better spot.
But there is more to it than that. There are many other services you can get. You pay as you go, so you might want to put some money in your shorts pockets. There is a restaurant that is open all night. The food is traditional Korean food at about the same prices you would get outside at a regular restaurant 3-5,000 won. There are also Internet services. You can use the Internet for about 1 dollar an hour or play computer games. In addition there is a barber and hairdresser and a masseurs on duty. They are there all night so if you decide that you want a massage at 3 in the morning, you can have one. There are also massage chairs if you prefer a less personal massage. Some chinshilbang are fancier than others. The one in Gwangu that I went to had noribang or karioke rooms. You could sing along with a karioke machine in a private room for about 50 cents. There was also a big playroom for little kids. The kind you might see at a fancy McDonald’s with roomfuls of balls, sliding boards, etc. Also the fancy ones show movies on nice giant flat screen plasma monitors. It’s fun.
So who goes to the chinshilbangs? Most of the people who are there are not travelers. They have a house or apartment in the same city and not too far away. So why would they leave their soft bed for a hard floor? The fancy ones cater to a younger crowd. Young boys will go there with their girlfriends. Nothing goes on. There is no place to be intimate, but it’s just a place they can go and spend the night together. You can see them huddled up in the middle of the floor, their arms draped around each other. A group or young people might go there with their friends and stay up all night eating snacks, watching movies, playing computer games and chatting or just talking. Older people go with their friends just as a social place to hang out. It’s not a place to go and meet someone. Everyone stays in their own group, but somehow you are all together and you don’t feel lonely even if you are there alone. There is the occasional traveler (like me) who is staying there as an alternative to a $30 hotel room.
On my first night in the chinshilbang I made the mistake of sleeping in a room where the floor was too hot. The Koreans seem to be used to this kind of thing. It gave me strange horrific dreams all night that mingled with the lout who was snoring obnoxiously next to me. I was unable to wake up and was trapped in a futuristic robot production facility. They were trying to make me into a robot, stamping me with hot plastic shrink-wrap. The roar of the machines (snoring) and the heat kept me glued to my spot as I moved down the assembly line. Finally I was able to escape. I rubbed my eyes and sat up. I was sweating. I looked up the large digital clock above the room. 6:25 am. I had made it. I had slept (kind of ) the whole night through. Slightly feverish (on one side) I decided to go to the sauna and take a soak. I trudged down the stairs to the locker room. Somehow it looked a little different. I was still half asleep so even when I saw a few naked women walked around it didn’t dawn on me that I had gone the wrong direction on the stairs. I should have gone up. The few naked women that I saw didn’t seem too upset they just walked away from me They saw my beard and western face and understood that I was just confused. When the attendant saw me she gently but firmly took my arm and ushered me outside to the elevator. “Up,” she said in English. I nodded sheepishly, still glad that I had escaped the robot factory. I wondered if they would charge me extra.
pictures of the chinshilbang