Spas: Not Just For the Ladies

I just got back from a very famous spa here in Korea: Heosimcheong Spa (it's pronounced sort of like hoe-sim-chong). Actually, I learned that it's the largest natural hot spring in ALL OF ASIA. Don't believe me? Read the wiki! It's really quite something, as long as you're comfortable with public nudity. That's essential, because everyone is NAKED, including YOU. Naturally, the baths are gender segregated to, you know, keep everyone honest. I was the ONLY westerner there, so I'm not sure if everyone was looking at me because of that or because of my admirable physique.

Perhaps they were looking at me because of my tattoo. There were signs posted in Korean and English with rules, just like you might find at a swimming pool. Conspicuously prohibited from bathing were people with TATTOOS. Generally, I'm a believer in following the cultural rules and norms of any place where I'm a guest. "When in Rome," and all that. But in this case...

It is true that not many Koreans seem to have tattoos, even the younger generation. Do they really think that having a tattoo makes me somehow unfit for public bathing? Anyway, I crossed the thresh hold and bathed right along with all the non-tattooed Koreans, and no one said anything to me about it. Although maybe this is because the spa staff didn't know how to say "You have to leave now," in English. Incidentally, the spa's website states that people with OFFENSIVE tattoos cannot bathe, so maybe they were really trying to eliminate the neo-Nazi swastika-sporting demographic (although a swastika is a good luck symbol here, so I maybe even neo-nazis can bathe freely).

The bathing area was composed of a large central pool, beautifully ornamented (I would have taken pictures, but there was that whole "nudity" thing going on), and many surrounding features. I spent some time in their sauna (while watching a show about sharks on the Korean Discovery Channel) and relaxed in the "Philospher's Bath," which was, for some reason, a disconcerting green color. I doused myself with the "waterfall bath," which pours water on you VERY VERY HARD. Almost as good as a massage. Many Korean men were laying or sitting down under the waterfall and letting it pour on their most sensitive areas. Which looked painful. Not to mention AWKWARD.

Unrelated to the spa-related activities, I'm about to finish my first week teaching here. So far, so good. I teach one (three-hour long) class on Mondays and Fridays, and two on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. So the week has a nice bell-curvy trajectory to it.

My Tuesday and Thursday classes left me utterly DRAINED because on those days I teach very very basic English to a very very large and excitable class of elementary school kids, then I teach very very basic English to a class of Middle School kids who seem to be linguistically disabled. And it's not necessarily their fault. The class is called English Chip Level 4, and it's literally the LOWEST level that the school puts Middle School students into. In other words, some (all?) of the students in my Middle School EC4 class tested LOWER than EC4 (significantly lower?), but they end up in EC4 anyway. As you can imagine, this makes it very difficult for me to teach them. I have to speak SOOOOO SLOWLY and repeat myself frequently, and it's soooo frustrating when they give me this completely blank look and can't answer even the most basic "yes or no" questions. What am I supposed to do when I literally don't know how to make the questions any easier?

My elementary school students didn't like it when I insisted that they speak ONLY ENGLISH in class (which is a school-wide policy). One very precocious (not to mention obnoxious) girl asked me in this very challenging tone why they had to speak English but no one in the United States had to learn Korean. I could have gotten defensive, or pointed out the many reasons why that argument was absurd (I mean, no one is forcing them to learn English, except maybe their parents). But I DIDN'T. Instead, I pretended like she said something really insightful. "Wow, guys, did you hear what Amy just said? Does anyone have any ideas why that might be the case?" No one had any ideas. So we moved on. In English. It was wonderful.