driving the point home, and the country

I don't know where to begin with this post... I feel I am at two opposite extremes with what I would like to convey. Do I begin with the sauna and the humorous encounter between eight nude American women and several of their Korean compatriots, or do I venture straight to the part where I am sitting in my homestay family's house wondering whether I will be able to avoid attending church four times a week with them?

Well, I'll start with yesterday evening, I suppose. Several of us decided that we'd rather skip dinner (if necessary) so that we could go to the second floor of the hotel to enjoy the sauna. There are two hot pools (one regular and one very hot one) and two dry saunas (again, one normal and one awesomely hot) and a cold pool. To either side are showering nooks, where you squat down on a very short stool, soap up and rinse off, before heading for the pools. The pools are lovely, with sulfur water I think, and very relaxing. We ended up doing yoga inside the hottest sauna-- talk about hot yoga!-- and alternating between the hot and the cold. The cold pool seemed to have something mentholated in the water; it was something we each felt in our lips and our lungs, but it felt good.

Toward the end we were wanting to scrub down, but didn't have anything. Missy saw a woman with some sort of scrub on her face and tried to ask her about it. The woman proceeded to smear this creamy mask-like substance (cleanser?) onto Missy's cheeks. She then brought the tube over to the rest of us and pointed it at each of us, then back at herself, saying, "mine" as if to indicate she'd like us to get it back to her. The women were quite friendly, actually, and animated. Cross-cultural communication facilitated through naked bathing. Not a bad practice, when you think about it, and it was nice because there was no sense of shame about bodies in that room. Very different from what one experiences in a girls' locker room back in the States. But perhaps the highlight, and certainly the most humorous moment, came when we were examining a strange platform over which red lights hung from the ceiling.

Missy and I stood there debating whether or not to press the shiny red button... who knew what would happen? We hesitated quite a bit, until finally, an older Korean woman came over to show us how to use it. She pressed the button, the lights came on, and she gestured for us to get onto the platform, which we did. But the three of us (because Claire had joined us by then) didn't want to lie down, so we sort of crouched there. This was apparently silly business, because it didn't take long for another Korean woman to come over to show us how to do it correctly. She put three towels down on the platform and gestured to us to lie down, which we did. But she kept gesticulating, mostly emphasizing whatever it was she war trying to tell us. She looked at Tara, who was standing nearby, as if she could somehow translate the message, which seemed urgent. Blank exchanges circulated among us. We had no idea what the woman was trying to tell us.

This seemed to frustrate the woman a little. She was standing, hips tilted forward, crouching ever so slightly, while still upright. She was very dramatic, insistent in whatever it was she wanted us to know that we were not understanding. Finally, exasperated with is, she reached out her open hand and slapped herself, but not in the face; she slapped herself directly on the mound of her vagina. Hard. The sound reverberated through the platform chamber. Missy looked for a moment as though she were considering whether or not we were being asked to mimic this gesture. When we still had confused expressions, the woman again turned to Tara, dumbfounded as to why we could not understand and why Tara could not make things clear. Tara gave it her best guess, given the action that had just occurred. "I think she wants you to turn around to that you are facing the wall and not the room," she said. So we did. This appeased the woman; finally we had understood that our naughty bits should not be exposed to the room as such.

Of course, once we figured this out we couldn't stop laughing. Was there really no other gesture that would have sufficed? Did we really all just experience a grown naked woman slapping her vagina at us? Certainly this is an experience I will never have again. We lay there, Claire, Missy and I, on the towels, under the red light, giggling uncontrollably. After a while, we decided that we had no idea what the benefit was of being under those lights. We weren't any drier, and we weren't quite close enough to be warmed by them. So, apart from looking fabulously like the cover of a 60s album, we weren't sure what the point of that particular experience was, so we got up to rinse off and leave. You can imagine this made for quite an entertaining dinner experience right afterward, when we relayed the entire event in detail.

So, now, today, I have met with my homestay family: Mr. Jo, Mrs. Koh, and their daughter Sinae (Shin-ay) and they are all very nice, though each of us has our nose in a dictionary trying to communicate. My Korean is obviously terrible, and the daughter's English is minimal, while her parents' is non-existent. She plays the piano and the drums, and her father is learning to play the drums. They all seem very sweet and their house is in the countryside of Haenam. The surrounding area is rice paddy fields as far as the eye can see. And the attend church four times a week. I am curious how this will unfold over the next two weeks.

I have told them I am agnostic and that half my family is catholic and episcopalian while the other half is atheist. I have not told them that the atheists tend to make more sense to me. But, I respect everyone's traditions and they seem good people, so I am keeping an open mind. I am hoping to use their church time to either write, or do yoga, things I feel a bit awkward doing around them. I am staying in their son's room, who is older that Sinae, but I don't know by how much; he doesn't appear to live at home any longer. I think dinner is almost ready, so I will be cutting this post short. Ad if this beast could be considered short. I hope you all are well. More to come later.