Public baths

About 40 kilometers from Taean is a spa resort that we decided to go to on Sunday.  This place is on the other side of the "Interstate" and the mountains.  It is still a little cool in the hills but is warming up.  The basically took a hot spring in the town of Deoksan that had been found in the hills and turned it into a resort.  It is also a water park so I'm not sure much of the spring is left.

Don't know what this guy is trying to tell me, but he seemed to be having a much better time inside the spa.  There was some important foreshadowing here, but I missed it at the time.

The entrance tells us what we are in for.

Here's the lay out of the waterpark and resort.  I took the picture on the crackberry so it is not of very good quality.  Even if you blow it up.

Shoe locker.  You have to take them off immediately after paying to get in.

This image, for want of a better word, is on the wall as you walk toward the locker room in your bare feet.  Don't really understand why the eyes and mouth are in the places they are.  The wall is black granite.

 Locker room, there were lots of naked Korean men and some naked Korean boys in this area and tons of lockers.  It was here I had an epiphany about the pink towels.  There were too many naked Koreans to take a picture of a stack of BLUE towels with an English label above them that said facial scrub towel.  These diaphonous towels are for scrubbing your face.

The lockers are RF controled using a wristwatch type device to match up with your locker.  Same number on the shoe lockers and clothes locker.  It also keeps track of anything you buy and I had to buy something and lunch.

This shower cap is what I had to buy.  Everyone had to buy one and it looked like they were very concerned about hair clogging up the pumps.  If that is so my friend Kevin who has a long beard and is generally a very hairy guy must have made them verrrrrry nervous.  The Koreans that I saw naked are pretty hairless.

Here is the "bade" spa.  I think this is another example of Korengrish, since they said they were trying to imitate a German spa I think they meant Bad or Baden which are German spa words.  There was a really high ceiling and a huge warm pool with various stations with different jets.  There were also different spas and saunas around including a "Jazz" spa (really offensively racist statues of black musicians and B.B. King playing on the TV), a Germanium (not Geranium) Sauna with elemental properties, a European spa and lots of other outdoor stuff.

Here is the statues in the "European" spa, which was a still hot pool of shallow watter about knee deep with lots of community area.

Here's a picture of one of the "Relex Bubbles" spa.  I am sure they meant relax.

The guide was in Korean and English and the whole place was very white guy friendly, except there were no English speakers.  Don't know what Dr. Fish is but there were spas advertising that and shops advertising that in Taean and Osan.  I should probably look it up.

I couldn't take pictures of the hot sauna (100 degrees C dry sauna, 54 degree C wet sauna, you had to be naked in there) the Oxygen room, the Amythest Ice Room (3 degrees C, the it was bearable, but you couldn't wear shoe so feet froze), severla rooms where the floor was hot and there was wood "pillows".  I didn't go on any of the water rides. 

We spent about 4 hours there, including lunch in a big hot tub bar where we had beer and hot dogs.