water temple & bath house

The next day my friend's amazing boyfriend made us a delicious Western breakfast and we checked out the water temple in Busan.

After the temple, we went to a bath house, which I had not done since coming to Asia. If you like running around naked, bath houses are awesome. They usually have a large room with pools of different temperatures, both hot and cold, and some with jets. There are saunas and steam rooms and massages and ajimas you can pay to scrub you. Along the outside of the main room there are rows of what look like individual vanity stations with shower heads. Sometimes they have outdoor parts as well. Males and females are separate of course, and children and babies are allowed. For someone like myself with tattoos and piercings, you have to check out the rules of the bath house before you go, because they don't all allow those.

Asians come to these to relax, but they take full on showers, brush their teeth, etc. They do a lot of stuff that you could do at home, but at a bath house it's social. And they're not super weird about being naked, because they are used to not really having much personal space.

My friend took me to a bath house where foreigners don't usually go, so we were stared at a LOT. We got scrub downs from the ajimas and they were VERY vigorous. We were under the impression that it was just going to be a back and should scrub, but they pretty much covered all bases and scrubbed us down everywhere. I mean everywhere. Not quite what I was expecting. And my scrubbing took place at a vanity station on the end of a row near the pool, so I literally had about 20 women watching the whole thing. It was pretty cool though, I'll definitely go to one again soon.