Inside a Women’s Bathhouse
On a Saturday night, the Olympus Women’s Health Club is crowded with naked women of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages.
Many of the women who frequent the bathhouse belong to the local Korean community in Lakewood, a suburb just south of Tacoma, Wash. For Korean women, the bathhouse is more than a place to get clean. It’s a community resource, a home away from home: a place to read newspapers and magazines in their native language, eat Korean home cooking, and catch up on gossip.
Other women drive from as far away as Seattle (45 minutes to the north) or Portland, Ore. (two hours to the south), to experience cleanliness, Korean-style.
The Olympus spa, which now has a second location in Lynnwood, a suburb north of Seattle, is a word-of-mouth sensation among women in the Pacific Northwest. They come, usually with friends, to drop their cares at the door of the women-only facility, where they find communal tubs for soaking, loofah massages for banishing rough skin, and the kind of conversation that only flows when women get naked together.
The ancient Romans had their marble palaces devoted to cleanliness and relaxation; the Japanese, their hot springs resorts and palatial public baths; and the Scandinavians, their saunas. The Olympus bathhouse combines a bit of all of these.
I’ll Have Mugwort, Please
A friend and I sign in at about 7 p.m. and are given waivers to sign and a sheet of rules written in charmingly fractured English: “Prohibit to enter by people with communicable disease.” The $30 entry fee covers unlimited use of the bath and sauna area, which has two heated pools, a cold pool with a waterfall, mineral pools, and two saunas—a dry sauna and an herbal steam room.
It also covers access to the “earth energy” heated rooms, which have floors of sea salt, sand, dried mud with mugwort, and granite.
Massages, facials, body wraps, and full-body scrubs are available for an additional charge. The most popular of these is the Asian-style full-body scrub, which lasts an hour.
When we check in, we are given locker keys on wristbands, bath towels, smaller towels for washing, striped cotton gowns, and cotton caps to cover our hair. We leave our shoes in cubbyholes on the way to the immaculate changing room, when a puzzling sign greets us: “Milk, oil, eggs are not permitted.”
We don our cotton robes and caps and head for the baths. The décor is an amusing combination of East and West—faux marble statues of chubby children look down on a row of low taps with stools and buckets for bathing, Asian-style, before entering the baths. Most of the Western women opt for showers instead.
For the next hour or so, we move between hot tubs at 97 and 104 degrees, the ice-cold waterfall tub, a mineral bath at a cool 90 degrees, and the two saunas.
There’s no need to hurry: The bathhouse is open until midnight on Friday and Saturday nights.
Small groups of women gather in each pool, chatting softly about work, family, men, and health issues, with an occasional reference to goings-on in the broader world. As the evening wears on, the conversations slow, becoming softer and more disconnected.
We make a brief foray to the earth energy rooms, where the various floors are covered with canvas, but we don’t stay long. We are starting to feel the heat.
The Ahhh Effect
Finally, it’s time for my scrub. The massage therapist sends me to sit in the herbal steam room for a few minutes, then calls me to her table in a narrow room just off the baths where four massage therapists work elbow to elbow. I lie facedown on the table and the therapist dons two loofah mitts and starts scrubbing upward from the bottoms of my feet to the skin behind my ears and every inch in between. She rolls me to my side and then my back as she continues, rinsing the dead skin away with buckets of warm water every few minutes.
Over and over, she scrubs my ankles, the skin between my fingers, under my chin, the tops of my feet … it feels heavenly. I drift into sleep. The final luxury is a gentle scrub with rich soapsuds and then, while I’m still soapy, a firm massage of my neck, shouldes, back, and head.
The therapist helps the new me off the table and sends me on my way with a laugh as I struggle to balance my oh-so-relaxed body. My skin is an smooth as the proverbial baby's bottom. I find my friend, and we head for the small restaurant inside the bathhouse.
There's no need to dress. Women gather in their identical cotton gowns and caps, towels slung over their shoulders, to order from a menu scrawled on a white board on the wall: fried rice, seaweed soup, pot stickers, cold noodles, and Japanese udon noodles. All the meals are served with a array of vegetable side dishes in little bowls.
Finally, we head out into the dark of the drizzly spring evening, feeling taller, thinner, more balanced, and cleaner, inside and out, than ever before.
Tacoma:
8615 S. Tacoma Way
Lakewood, WA 98499
(253) 588-3355/ 582-6625
Lynnwood:
3815 196th Street S.W. Suite 160
Lynnwood, WA 98036
(425) 697-3000
I originally wrote this story for the MyWellness Web site in 2000. Unfortunately, the site never got out of beta—another victim of the Web bubble.
@ Jeanne Sather 2007.
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