The Scrub

It's midnight, I lock eyes with my friend Sydney, lying naked on the plastic bed in front of me, our skin floating in brown, slimy clumps around us. We share a sympathetic look as our two charges yank our limbs apart and scrub our most private places with industrial strength Brillo pads. 

Is it a prison camp? A torture chamber? No. In fact, we were paying good money for the privileged of having our bodies publicly scrubbed. We were in a jjimjilbang (a Korean bath house), enjoying Korean cleansing at its finest.

In an earlier post about jjimjilbangs I described everything apart from the Korean rub, which I hadn't quite been brave enough to try, but now I've done it a couple of times and on Thursday I went along with Sydney to 'share' her first scrubbing experience.

The scrub takes place inside the bathing area of the jjimjilbang, more or less in full view of everybody in there. The 'scrubbers' are usually middle-aged women wearing lacy underwear and diamante jewelry. 

You lie on the plastic-covered massage table, where your 'scrubber' throws a bucket of warm water over you and then begins to scrub away at your dead skin cells.

It isn't a relaxing experience and it certainly doesn't deserve the title 'massage' (맛사지). During the scrub the Korean lady slapped my ass to signal when it was time for me to change position, she handled me roughly, like a piece of meat, yanking my lanky limbs around and dropping them carelessly when she was done, and she made no effort to conceal her discontent at my inadequate Korean language skills. 

Getting covered in baby oil and being rubbed, scrubbed and man-handled by an old Korean lady gave me the feeling of being a child, being bathed by a stern, dour Grandmother, like those you see in Victorian films. Pretty weird to say the least, but it's certainly a unique experience.

Thoughts that crossed my mind mid scrub...

I wonder if she's talking about me in Korean. What's going to happen next?!?! Jesus! That's a mole stop trying to scrub it off! Not the nipples... arrrrgh! This is so unflattering. I wonder how much weight in skin I will lose...

Strange as it was for me, as an English woman, I would earnestly recommend everybody try it at least once. Korean women do it on a weekly basis and it does leave your skin feeling baby soft. 

If you are interested in reading a slightly less dramatic account of our scrub experience, click here to go to Sydney's blog.