APR 24, 2025
Dear Reader,
I did a thing this week that I never in a million years thought I would ever do. I got naked in public.
I should explain. Probably. Or I could leave you wondering if it was on a street corner or in a bar or perhaps I joined a new-wave yoga studio. (Is there such a thing as naked yoga?).
It’s my birthday this week (hooray, another trip around the sun!), so to celebrate Mr. Melinda and Ms. Edwina first took me shopping for shoes. I’m a horrible shoe shopper. I never know what I want, or it never feels comfortable, or I think it’s too expensive, or any number of other reasons why I wind up in the shoe department for literal hours surrounded by mountains of cast off boxes of shoes.
To say they both must love me to put up with that is a HUGE understatement.
I left with four pairs of shoes which hopefully will last me at least ten years.
After that, they took me to dinner, at which Mr. Melinda gave me a beautiful sparkly butterfly necklace that I adore, and Ms. Edwina gave me a hint.
Ms. Edwina: Your present from me happens tomorrow.
Me: What are we doing?
Ms. Edwina: One of these is true: it will involve either performance art or being naked in public.
Me: We’re singing karaoke? (I was actually kind of excited about that part. The other part not so much)
Ms. Edwina: Nope. Here’s a hint: it will involve getting wet. And it will involve mud.
Me: We’re going mud wrestling? (Because in my mind that combined both performance art AND getting naked in public, with water and mud).
Ms. Edwina: Tempting, but no.
At this point, we started playing twenty questions.
Me: We’re getting one of those weird pedicures where fish eat your skin. Not sure how the mud figures in. Are there leeches?
Ms. Edwina (rolling her eyes): No.
Me: We’re going to an escape room featuring a jungle set where we have to slog through a swamp to get out?
Ms. Edwina (looking intrigued): Um, no.
Me: We are…hmmm…going to a theme park? With a mud bog?
Ms. Edwina: Sure, that’s it.
Me: Really?
Ms. Edwina: No.
Me: Okay, my best guess…we are going to a spa. Maybe one of those with a mud bath that you sit in while they bring you umbrella drinks.
Ms. Edwina: Forget the mud. There’s no mud.
Me: But you said…
Ms. Edwina: No. Mud.
I was thoroughly confused. I was also driving. You might think I’d have to know where I was going in order to get there but as it turns out, no. I didn’t know until Ms. Edwina directed me to turn into the parking lot for a Korean spa and sauna called Gangnam Spa Healing Paradise.
I’ve always wanted to go to a spa retreat. I always pictured mountains or maybe an ocean would be involved, but this was not far from downtown Houston.
We checked in at the front desk where they handed us a “uniform”, gave us keys for a shoe locker and a clothes locker, and we were released into the women’s baths to enjoy all the spa had to offer.
I didn’t know a thing about Korean spas before this.
As it turns out, the showers, which you’re required to visit first so that everything stays as clean as possible, are in the wet area/pool room…and they’re open air. As in, rows of showers, no curtains, no doors, no big towels. You leave your clothes behind in the locker, along with your phone and everything else, and walk bare-assed naked across the locker room into the pool room where you shower and then take a plunge in one of three pools.
Did I mentioned you’re naked?
No clothes.
No towel.
No…anything.
Here’s where I should mention that I’ve never played team sports and even if I had, in my school gym there were curtains. In the fitness center there were doors.
In a Korean Spa…there’s community. Naked, bare assed community.
To say I was shocked and nervous and a little…well, yes, freaked at first is putting it mildly.
It’s a darn good thing Ms. Edwina didn’t tell me about that part until I walked into the locker room.
But after the first few minutes of awkward what-the-hell-am-I-doing-ness of it all, the whole I’m NAKED IN PUBLIC freak out faded into a when-in-Rome sort of calm. Maybe it was the soothing background music. Maybe it was the way all the other women there acted like it was no big deal.
Maybe it was the incredibly soothing mugwort bath. It was magical. It melted all the tension as it soothed sore muscles and eased my mind.
I’m not sure how long we were in that pool, but only the fact that there were a lot of other areas to explore pried me out of it.
We spent over five hours at the spa, a lot of it in the communal space, which is co-ed and where yes, you wear the uniform they give you while you explore the oxygen room, clay room, a foot pool, and sauna rooms with rock salt walls or clay. There’s massage chairs that I’d really love to have in my house, and areas to simply take a nap. It was truly a retreat, where I left my phone and the world behind in a locker and just…existed.
It was a birthday treat I’ll never forget, because it was something I’d never done before and because I experienced it with my best friend.
Mr. Melinda asked me if it was awkward, being naked like that with a friend.
Yes, at the beginning. No, by the end of it. It was relaxing, and it was so much easier to enjoy that pool without having to fight with a bathing suit, and after awhile it’s just…bodies. Not good or bad. Our bodies carry us around and make life possible and besides, we’re all naked under our clothes anyways. Right?
Maybe in another life I’d have been a nudist?
Nah.
I’m glad it all happened in that space, behind those walls. What happens in a Korean Spa stays in a Korean Spa, right?
Have you ever been to one? What did you think?
Until next time,
**Book News**
GaG — Current Word Count: 8,522. I didn’t add many words this week. Proper birthday celebrating requires several days, after all.
Favorite Line of the Week: “Because, dear,” her mother’s voice took on the patient tone of someone who’s made the point a thousand times before, “for some reason you decided to plant roots instead of grow wings.”
April is a big birthday month in my family. It’s not just mine, it’s also my Dad’s birthday, and two cousins, one niece, a nephew, and several friends. July was apparently a very, er, busy month for a lot of people, if you know what I’m saying.