Night of the Ajuma

I got stuck in Seoul Sunday night. Argh. I showed up at the bus station at 10:30, hoping to catch the 11:00 (last bus) to Jeomchon and instead found no seats available. My only option was to stay in a jimjilbang (spa).

Normally I don't mind doing the jimjilbang thing but I was already starting to get sick (coughing, sneezing, headache) and had been walking all over Seoul all day with Jeremy, shopping for travel/trekking gear. I was completely exhausted and really didn't feel too optimistic about sleeping on the floor, but I had very few choices. Seeing how I needed to catch the 6:00 am bus in order to be at work on time, renting a hotel room seemed somewhat impratical--I would only be there for a few hours. Thus, I found myself sleeping at a mysterious, little known jimjilbang in the middle of Gangbyeon-dong.

The jimjilbang in itself was kind of nice. It was really small but sufficient for my purposes and had a really cool seperate sleeping room for women (not that a seperate sleeping room mattered much). While usually everyone sleeps on the same floor together, this jimjilbang had a very dark room with little cave-like structures for individuals to sleep in--really nice. I loved that it was dark and quiet! So, crawling into my little hole sometime around mid-night, I began my quest for sleep. Too bad it was hotter than Dante's inferno!! Holy cow! It took me nearly an hour to finally drift off! But I finally did.

Enter Ajuma.

Sometime around 1:30 am I was awoken by some ajuma at my feet slapping my legs, pushing me over, yelling and trying to take the blanket I was sleeping on! I was so confused!! "Who is this woman accosting me?!" I thought. I tried yelling at her in Korean (not that I had much to yell--my Korean isn't so good) but she kept on hitting me and tugging at my blanket. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not that she found me sleeping because I really wasn't awake enough to fight her off. All I could think of was the other people trying to sleep and that I just wanted to go back to sleep myself, so I rolled over, threw the blanket in her face, and yelled something nasty in English (I know, shame on me!). But had I actually been awake, who knows where it could have gone! I spent the next hour slowly waking up and getting more and more pissed with each passing moment. If I had been fully awake and aware when she started hitting me, I may have hit her back and that would not have been good! Ajumas are strong old ladies weathered with years of hard manual labor in feilds and packing toddlers all over the city on their backs. She probably would have beat me up had I tried to fight back. But then again, maybe I would have beat her up... But I doubt beating up an old lady would register high as far as bragging rights go!

All in all, a blanket isn't really a good reason to fight over and though I had a really hard time falling back to sleep (I kept getting stuck on the plastic mat I slept on because I was hot and sweaty and had no blanket barrier), at least I didn't react too badly. I think I did the right thing to give up the blanket and roll over.

Stupid ajumas.