A day with ajummas: sweatin’.

“Ajumma” is a Korean word that, as far as I could tell, usually refers to the crotchety, short old Korean women who yell at everyone else a lot, but apparently it can also just mean housewife – maybe it’s just used for any Korean woman over the age of 30 or so. The woman who teaches Zoe Korean also teaches English to housewives, and a couple of them offered to show me around Masan while Zoe was teaching, for only the price of speaking English with them.

They only told me their English names – Ashley and some other typical name. They were really fun – one of them really likes soju, and one of them plays the Korean drum and every once in a while would say, “Sometimes I wish I am single.” Ah, the joys of married life.

It was raining that day [I was there during the rainy season and actually mostly had pretty good weather, considering], so they decided to take me to a Korean sauna.






The basic process goes something like this: you shower with others of your gender and then put on the uniform they give you of a shirt and shorts. They also give you a small towel, which one of the ajummas rolled up into “sheep heads” for all of us. Then you go into the sauna area, which is co-ed. It’s a big open space with sauna huts, a small restaurant [we had a spread of Korean food for lunch], a drink and snack bar [tea for them, lemonade for me, and baked eggs for all of us], mats to take naps on [although some people were content just sleeping on the floor], an area for facial masks and so on, a few televisions, and probably more. You pretty much go back and forth between all the stations as you see fit.

The sauna huts all have different temperatures, and one of them is even cold, complete with icy snow on parts of the wall. The hot ones I could only stand for five or ten minutes, maximum, but I think I could’ve stayed in the cold one all day long and been perfectly fine – you can take the girl out of Wisconsin, but I guess you really can’t take the Wisconsin out of the girl. The floor of one of the hot ones was covered in salt pebbles, which I’m guessing is good for the skin.

When you’ve decided you’ve had enough of sweating like crazy and lying about watching television, you go back into the gender-appropriate area to shower again, sit in various hot tubs [naked!] with varying temperatures, including a seawater tub, and then shower again. I think I’ve never been cleaner.

They also had things that were kind of like toilets, except instead of a toilet bowl, they had a little heating element. The ajummas told me it’s good for your baby pocket. We figured out they meant uterus, but I like "baby pocket" better. The picture is us sitting on the baby pocket saunas, even though you can’t really tell.