Part 4: Final & Funniest

I must be a masochist, because I willingly (and literally) bellied up for the special Jeju body scrub. Here’s the scene: In the bath area there’s a tiled wall that barely conceals the body scrub area, where patrons are laid out on tables like slabs of meat, and Korean ladies attired only in black bras, panties, and abrasive pastel mittens are scrubbing as if their very lives depended on delivering a thorough exfoliation.

That zeal is really what attracted me to this treatment. I’m big on exfoliating (or anything that promises to decrease my diameter even a teensy bit). I really couldn’t resist, so I steeled my resolve and approached the bra & panty clad lady who appeared to be the head matron, and declared (remember I’m buck naked making this declaration), “I’d like a body scrub, please.” “Ok, ok”, she chirped cheerfully, “you go hide in pool 5 minutes!”. An odd choice of words, I thought, but I did as I was told until she reappeared at the edge of the pool and beckoned me with a sweeping arm gesture. As I walked behind her to the table, I wondered why they didn’t wear bathing suits instead of sensible foundation garments.

She led me to my table, and oh joy!, it was the first table - the most-visible-to-everyone-in-the-whole-place-table, that is. Fabulous. She instructed me to lay down on my back, at which point, she poured a bucket of warm water all over me. My thought, “Oh great. Now I need to pee.” Before I could worry too much about it, she slapped a wet towel across my eyes and forehead and told me to relax, whereupon she began to scrub my legs with a vengeance. As she worked, all my parts wiggled and wobbled in direct proportion to her zeal.

No part of me escaped unscathed, including between my toes. At one point, while she was basically sanding one of my boobs in a sort of wax on, wax off motion, she asked me if I wanted the “deluxe massagie”. As I said, “No, thank you.”, I thought, “I’m pretty sure I’m already getting one!”. Even without the deluxe treatment, I started on my back, was turned onto my left side, my stomach, and then my right side. She sat me up, spun me around, washed my hair, stood me up, scrubbed me again, and poured buckets upon buckets of water all over me for a full 40 minutes. Mind you, I still had to pee.

The result: my skin is softer than it’s ever been, I have a story to tell, and I learned what it is to feel very, very clean and a wee bit dirty at the same time.