The Ramblings of Loren Christopher

This weekend has been nice and relaxing…..no trips out of town, just hanging out in Seoul with friends, catching up on some work and reading.  There has also been a lot of smog in the city lately I’ve noticed, more than usual at least.  Anyway, Seoul is a city where you can find lots of random things to do to suit whatever mood you happen to be in on that given day.  That’s one of the things I like about this city so much is that you can never really get bored….and I suppose if you do then you only have yourself to blame for it.

One such strange and interesting excursion (that I’d been wanting to try for quite a while now) is a visit to Dr. Fish.  This isn’t a real doctor, it’s a nice little cafe with books and a cozy interior, but they also have a foot spa area.  The fun thing to do at Dr. Fish is to actually have your feet eaten by a big group of a special kind of fish.

You go in and take off your shoes and socks, wash your feet off, and then plop them into one of these tiny pools filled with hungry little fishies just waiting to bite off all the dead skin from your feet!  We went to the one in Gangnam (it’s right across the street from CGV) and everyone was really nice.  We were ushered around instantly by this Korean guy who works there.  After we had something to drink, we went over and washed our feet and he asks us, “Which fish would you like?” (pointing to two of these little pools)  ”Big fish, or small fish?”

Now we are all of the spirit that if you’re going to try something new, you may as well dive right into it, so we chose the “big” fish….which, to be fair, weren’t really TOO big, just bigger than the other minnow-sized ones.  Nothing could have prepared me for the bizarre feeling that I was about to endure.  Immediately after I stuck my feet in, the fish came swarming up to me and attacking, so I jerked them out of the water.  These things take time to get used to.  I had to dip my feet in for a few seconds at a time and then pull them out.  Gradually I got more and more used to the feeling of all these sandpaper-like mouths chomping away at my dead skin, that I was able to relax a bit.

Conversation was difficult though, as I would randomly interject my sentences with a loud “WOOAH!!”  or an “EEEK!”  I must have looked like I was having seizures because my body would jerk into different directions periodically.  Especially when they got up under my toes, that really sent me into convulsions!  For twenty minutes though, and at just 2,000 won ($2), it was an experience that was well worth it.  And my feet do feel really soft now thanks to all the “food” I gave those little guys!  I will definitely go back sometime.

We headed down the street to Dos Tacos for some Mexican food and margaritas, a nice way to relax after Dr. Fish.  Then we headed over to a board game cafe.  They have these randomly throughout the city and I think it’s such a fun idea.  You go in, and they’re set up like little coffee shops.  After you order something to drink and look at the “game menu”, you just order whichever board game you’d all like to play and they bring it to your table.  We ended up playing Clue: the Simpsons version and had a lot of fun.  I hadn’t played Clue since I was little, and even then I only played a couple times I think….so we were all a bit “clueless” (har har har) as to what the rules were, but we quickly got the hang of it.

Gangnam is a really fun area of Seoul….it’s one of the biggest areas actually and the one where most Koreans want to live.  So there are lots of things to do there as you could imagine.  Unfortunately like I said it has been really smoggy lately, so I didn’t take any pictures of the street because you wouldn’t be able to see a whole lot.  I frequent Gangnam though so I’ll be sure to post some another time.  For now though, I need to do a little more work and get to bed.