I tried something completely new today. When I started this blog, I intended to write about fun and interesting things. Maybe even sometimes things to do or must see things in Dallas. Occasionally, I'd dive into a memory of something or veer inward, but mostly my posts were outward facing. See, I started this blog because I was trying to occupy myself with creating and focusing on positive... er, perfect... things when I desperately needed positivity in my life. But then things got even harder (as they do), and I had lots of surgeries and other hard things that turned me very inward. And lots of introspective postings have come pouring out of me. More of those to come, I'm sure. But not today.
Today's post is more akin to the ones that started this whole thing... well, at least kind of. Today's post is physical. Sensational. Oh that's a good word for this. It's about something purely sensory and sensational. I actually DO have a place.. ahem, and experience... to recommend.
I am a junkie for massages. I cannot understand how any human doesn't want/crave/need massages on a regular basis. I mean. Really. I started getting massages regularly, and out of necessity, when I started having my joints fail me. It started with my left shoulder in 2009. I first went to a chiropractor, who also did massage, and only did that a few times as it didn't seem to help much. Plus the guy sorta creeped me out. So then I switched to non-chiropractic massage. I've tried all sorts. Had memberships at massage places. Visited spas. Had medical massage and acupuncture. During some times on my broken-body journey, I've gone for massages as frequently as weekly. Other times, I had forced dry spells because my broken parts were too fragile to take it. Nowadays, I go every two to three weeks for maintenance. By that point, my muscles are often at their breaking point, and they need some deep release. Hypermobile joints make muscles work too hard. Plus Life on top of that. And I'm still not physically right... maybe never will be... but massages help me be and do the most I can with this vessel I've got. My current masseuse is really a physical therapist/masseuse. It's a fully clothed experience, with deep pressure, working out all the nasty knots and hot spots. And sometimes hurts, in that necessary way. I first went to him on a prescription from my shoulder surgeon (the good one). He knows all the names and locations of all the muscles and explains why the pains in my body show up the way they do. He helps me feel better physically and helps me understand this damn bodily pain that persists. I'm not complaining. Really. I'm about to get to the point of this post. But I do rely on those massages as much as I rely on water to drink.
I had a physical therapy massage yesterday. That was necessary. And helpful. And all the good things. But it wasn't new or sensational.
Today. That was new. And sensational.
I went to King Spa in Dallas today with a close girlfriend of mine. King Spa is a traditional Korean spa, known in Korea as a Jjim-Jil Bang. My friend frequents King Spa and has been many many times over the past however many years it's been since it opened. This was my first time. I'm going to attempt to recount what happened chronologically because I'm still sort of in blissful shock.
First, my friend picked me up and we drove far north, almost to Farmer's Branch, to King Spa. She paid for us to get in with a Groupon, and the difference we paid as an entry fee was a meager $7. They gave us wristbands with keys and "gym suits" and sent us on our way. We walked from there into the locker room, and we were immediately confronted by a nude woman bending over. I scanned the room and saw that it was, indeed, an entirely nude locker room. Women just strolling around. Paying for spa services. Drying off. What have you. All nude. A few in gym suits. I've been in many locker rooms at gyms and spas. Many. Most women's locker rooms have folks changing clothes, of course, but usually they're more modest. This was loungey-er. More casual. More intentional. Different.
My friend and I found our lockers and changed into our gym suits, and then she gave me a tour of the massive facility. (Let me stop here to explain that the entire place is NOT a nude spa. There are plenty of co-ed parts where people wear the gym suits. Or bathing suits if it's the co-ed pool area. And, by the way, the gym suits are unflattering baggy shorts and t-shirts. Nothing fancy or glamorous about them.) We toured everything... the pool area, restaurant area, a sea of recliners, a movie theater, the very many sauna options (hot and cold varieties, each with themes), and also the bar area overlooking the pool. It was almost like Disney World. But without Mickey. And I wouldn't take my kids (though some people do... I saw some).
I warned my friend that she was giving this lovely tour of this massive place to her most directionally-challenged friend (I seriously have no sense of direction...) and that I'd probably still have questions and lose my way through the maze of distracting places, especially as I kept finding myself focused on bizarre murals and other decor choices. More about those later as we go.
Next, we returned to the locker room. And it was a When In Rome experience. After having two babies and seven orthopedic surgeries in the past decade, I've lost any bashfulness I may have ever had about my body. Though in all honesty, I've never really been that shy. And I also took twelve semester hours of life drawing (nudes) in art school, which translates to eight hours a week for two years, which also helped me appreciate the human form in a non-sexualized but aesthetically pure way. And, indeed, though it all sounds weird writing it down (I almost didn't even write this blog post because I recognize this all sounds bizarre-o to us 'Mericans), it became normalized pretty quickly. I guess that's what happens when you're surrounded by folks all doing the same thing unabashedly. It's easy to just go along with the flow.
Just off of the locker room behind glass doors and stacks of orange hand towel-sized towels, there was a large, very wet room with rows of showers and bathing areas lining the walls and four "baths" -- three in the center and one at the back of the room. Three of them were varying degrees of hot (large bubbly hot tubs), and one was cold where women would occasionally plunge for a short time. I stuck with the hot water, though my friend braved the cold one more than once. And one girl dived into it, though a sign said no diving. There were lots of signs telling people what to do and not to do everywhere... so many that even this lawyer was overwhelmed and didn't read them all. Except the one that said something like "Avoid the Toads," which were hot water faucets shaped like toads spitting scalding water into the hot baths. So we blissfully soaked nude in the hot tubs with whatever random women happened to be there with us at from time to time until we were getting pruney. I could even pretty much float on my back in there, like I love to do in swimming pools, it was so roomy. I loved the weightlessness in the bubbly hot tub. (I so need to buy a hot tub... that will be another blog post some other time.) Again, it sounds kinda crazy, but really it was relaxing and peaceful despite the naked strangers everywhere. Most of the ceiling had these large circular dimple shapes, and I kept finding myself tracing over them with my eyes as I relaxed into the hot water. And my eyes liked focusing on them better than the back-lit, slightly faded, Venus de Milo staring down at us from the center of the ceiling. And I wondered if the shiny circular air vents here and there among the circular shapes in the ceiling were really cameras. Then I decided they better not be and convinced myself to stop thinking about it.
Then I heard about this magical thing called an Aroma Ceremony Scrub.
This. Is. Something. I. Never. Imagined.
Essentially, there are these plastic coated pink massage tables lined up in a row (maybe ten or so) behind a 3/4 high marble wall with Simpsons themed glass work above the walls (kinda like the glass partitions between booths at restaurants... but why Simpsons (like Homer and Bart Simpson... really), I have no idea, and I wouldn't have even noticed the Simpsons theme if my friend hadn't pointed it out... it was that subtle), with deep barrels of hot water being filled and refilled between the tables. And each table had assigned to it a Korean woman whose job it is to bathe, scrub, and massage the women who sign up for the Aroma Ceremony Scrub. You can choose to get only a scrub or only a massage, but I don't know why in the world anyone would choose only one when you can sign up for the whole shebang. I expect many people reading this have had professional massages at some point. And those are typically nude. With tactfully draped covers. They're not like this. They're modest and dark. This is not that. But it's also not weird somehow. Getting scrubbed and bathed by these skillful women was a treat I had no way to expect would be so professional and so relaxing. The deep respect they had for cleansing and treating the body well was deeply apparent and like no other experience I've had. A few times, I thought to myself, is this legal? I also thought to myself about various people I knew, wondering if they would ever find themselves in the situation in which I found myself. And then I wondered how these women came to choose this as their profession. And then I thought about how most Americans are prudish -- we're taught to be that way by so many societal norms and pressures. But most other cultures aren't. Silly Americans. But mostly, I drifted off into blissful relaxation. I won't go into detail about the treatment (this ain't that kind of blog), but I suppose it's pretty much what you would expect an Aroma Ceremony Scrub would be in a place like this. Except it's 90 minutes. Nintey. And they wash your hair. And douse you with giant buckets of hot water that feel like ocean waves throughout everything. And it's a hundred times more incredible and calming than you can imagine. Actually, there's no way I could have imagined this experience ahead of time, so that measure is probably way off. And here's the kicker, when you finish, they give you a card for another free entry. They create lots and lots of addicts that way, I'm sure. From the other women I saw in there getting massages and scrubs, I can say they certainly aren't hurting for customers.
My friend didn't do the Aroma Ceremony Scrub today as she opted for a regular (dry) massage instead, though she described to me the time she did do the Aroma Ceremony Scrub as "epic." That's pretty fitting.
When I finished up and changed back into my lovely gym suit, I met my friend for lunch in the restaurant. We both felt happily woozy after our treatments - she described it as feeling high. I think we needed to eat by that point, too, and we were uber relaxed. Good thing I had no important decisions to make right then (which is a break from the norm... and a welcome one). I had beef and egg ramen, and she had this bright red super spicy chicken soup. We sat in the most delightful majestic little chairs with pink leather cushioned seats and white ornate woodwork with gold detail on the backs as we slurped up the goodness. But the chopsticks were smooth metal which did not work with my slippery noodles, and I felt like an idiot using them, so I switched to a fork and spoon, a little let down with my skills, to be honest. But it was delicious. And we chugged water. Lots of it. And my friend pointed out the bizarre mural in the restaurant area, which I hadn't noticed because I'd been too focused on the wall-sized menu of all sorts of goodies. And I noticed a weird wall with pumpkin decor near the Sphinx room across the way. And the menu showed that they had shaved ice that I'm gonna definitely have to try next time.
We then headed to all the crazy saunas in our pretty gym suits... one had a pyramid theme, with a sphinx outside, which was lovely, but kinda too hot pretty quickly. One had giant amethyst geodes everywhere. We tried a few others, and the themes of them are kind of running together in my mind, but they all had varying levels of heat and kiln-like quality, and varying murals or other wall treatments. In some we sat, and in some we had to lie on the floor -- sometimes on mats, sometimes on large bamboo coverings. I wondered if my metal cane would get hot to the touch sitting in the saunas, but somehow it didn't. And then we went in the cold room, where we could see our breath (but I couldn't blow smoke rings, but for some reason I tried), but we didn't stay in there too long. And then we spent quite a while in the oxygen room, where we laid on mats on the floor, this time with head cushions, apparently breathing in extra oxygen, which seems like it can't be a bad idea. We only heard one man snoring in one of the saunas, which is surprising given how relaxed every single body in that place seemed. But we definitely saw lots of people passed out asleep on the recliners and couches in the open areas (good for them).
When we'd had our fill of laying in saunas that felt like lying on a warm sandy beach but without all the sand, we headed back to the locker room for one last soak in the hot tubs and a rinse off in the showers.
All of this took about five hours. For the Aroma Ceremony Scrub and my ramen, at the end I paid a grand total of about $129.00. It may be the most well spent $129.00 I've paid in quite some time. Good thing they gave us free entry return vouchers. And thank goodness for friends who are comfortable enough with themselves and their friends to introduce them to such a bizarre and sensational place.
*You know you totally want to see this place. http://www.kingspa.com/dallas/facilities.html There's even a picture of the toads you're not supposed to touch on that page. And here's D Magazine's description: https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/march/spa-wars-korea-vs-russia/ (Note, even D Magazine recommends the Aroma Ceremony Scrub.)
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