DMZ style (the prelude)

So this weekend Bonnie and I made a trip to the DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone, the boarder between North and South Korea). The journey began on Friday night because we had to report to the military base in Seoul by 7AM so we headed up early. Our plan was to sleep in a sauna. If you read the blog regularly you might remember a post I made a couple of months ago about these places. Another perk of these lovely bath houses is that you can sleep there for free. However, they are not at all like a hotel. The sleeping arrangements consist of a 1/2 inch thick foam mat and a rectangular block of foam "pillow" about the size of a brick. Regardless of the sleeping condition it is cheap; 5 to 10 bucks a person at most.

Like I said our journey began Friday night when we headed up to Seoul. Usually it would have taken us about 1.5 hours to make it to our destination; this night it took 3. So we didn't get to Itaewon (part of Seoul) until 9PM and then we couldn't find the sauna we planned to stay in. We went to a nearby Cold Stone to sooth our frustrations. As we sat in Cold Stone we noticed across the street that there was a building with a sauna logo on it (looks like a little steaming pot). It wasn't the one we were looking for but it would work.

We decided to pay for access to the jin-jil-bong, a coed section of the bath house, with the hope that we could sleep in the same area. They give you special pajamas to wear so they know you paid for it, which is kind of funny because the only people in the room are wearing pink or blue pajamas. Anyway we go soak in our respective bath houses and meet in the middle to go find a place to sleep in the jinjilbong. Well it turned out that the jinjilbong was kind of loud and the the lights were still pretty bright at 10:30 so we decided to sleep separately in our male and female bath house sleeping rooms.

I go to my room which was basically like a loft above the bath house (this made things very warm) with a 4 to 5 foot high ceiling. I find a little foam mat a try to fall asleep. This was a very strange environment to fall asleep in because there were bodies scattered about the loft and you don't know any of them and they are snoring and making all kinds of strange noises; you can hear people rustling around and coming and going too. We'll I'm getting pretty sleepy and I begin to hear someone walking toward my section of the loft. He is getting closer and closer and eventually I can tell that he is standing right next to me. My mind begins to race as to what I should do. Did I take his mat? Am I doing something wrong? So I open my eyes a little to see where this guy is and he is hovering directly over the top of me just staring at me! This was pretty unnerving. I close them and wait. He doesn't move. I finally open my eyes again and just stare at the dude, as if to say "go away." He kind of flinches, shuffles away, grabs a mat, and pulls it up right next to me; less than a foot away. What the crap is going on!?!?!

I try to just ignore the guy and I lay there paralyzed for like 10-20 minutes. Eventually I hear him start snoring so I get up and move to another part of the loft. At this point it is about midnight. Now I can't fall asleep because it is so unbearably hot that I am sweating a ton and sticking to my foam mat. I finally decided about 1:30 to head back down to the jinjilbong and see if it has quieted down. It had and there were little 2 foot tall vertical divides lined up against one wall with mats in between so I laid down there with two foam blocks much cooler and confident that I wouldn't have anyone pulling up next to me. I think I woke up about every 20 to 30 minutes out of discomfort. At some point in the night (I have no idea when) I was startled out of my sleep by a Korean woman shaking me, leaning over my divider, and shaking a foam block at me as if to ask if she could take it. Once again what in the crap is going on!?!?! Yes take the block! Please! Let me sleep!

After all that I managed to get enough sleep to make due. Bonnie had a less harrowing evening but was still unbearably hot while trying to sleep. Wow that post took a while. More on the actual DMZ in the next post.