After four months, I am still a little unsure of this country, this culture, these people, who sometimes mirror an exclusive club, the kind that just might keep The List at the front door. 

The tall, monolith white concrete apartment buildings sit stoically between green and gray craggy peaks as buses burn through red lights. Smartly-dressed women in high-heels and tight skirts chatter on cell phones at bus stops. Men in black business suits hawk and spit as they hurry down cracked sidewalks. Birch trees line main thoroughfares, where red-painted bike paths parallel the sidewalks.  

This is South Korea, a country where postcards are rare, a real sign that you are somewhere off the grid.  It’s a country where mountains beget mountains, where each night thin-walled norabangs, karaoke rooms, fill with crooning wannabe Brittany Spears’ and Celine Dion’s. 

Buddhism and Confucianism still persist in this land. Gray-cloaked monks live in peace, harmony and serenity in hidden mountain temples and young Koreans are quick to give up their seat on crowded buses for a sonsaengnim, teacher. In Korean culture, this word is not only used to address teachers, but anyone older, and therefore wiser.   

It’s a country where English is rarely spoken. As native English speakers infiltrate the education system by the thousands, the language is starting to creep out of the cities and into smaller schools and then out of the mouths of school children with bouncing backpacks on street corners between school sessions. The language is also trickling into the ears of older people, some of whom are occasionally plucky enough to get in a little practice. 

It’s a country where the food is spicy and the alcohol fiery. From the spicy kimchi to the sweet red-bean soup, the food is healthy, hearty; the side dishes, banchan, a mosaic of reds, greens yellows, oranges, browns. It is everything that American food is not. The kimchi could not be further away in taste (or distance) from that yellow, crumbly cornbread at home. 

As an American brought up on the fringes of the American Deep South, I was taught conservativeness on all fronts—from politics to propriety. The politics weren’t embedded deep enough to make it through college, but the candles of modesty and reservation still burn from within, rooted so deep that it will take more than a few changing winds to smother. 

So it is no small miracle that I have found the courage to do what every Korea guidebook and internet travel tidbit tells you to do, one of the top five ways to really get the quintessential Korean experience. 

The Korean public bath, or jimjjilbang, experience is not a novelty, at least not to those who live here. To Koreans, it is a way of life. It’s social. Familial. Routine. 

For me, an English teacher living in Gwangju, South Korea, it is a challenge, a piece of culture so raw and so real that to take part I would really have to expose myself. Really dip my toes into the water. And really, finally, submerge. 

The public bath is my worst nightmare. That one where I am naked in public, except I really am naked in public, and I really couldn’t be anymore awake.  And to add to matters, I am cleaning parts of my body that I normally wash in the privacy of my tiled tub at home with the bathroom door locked, steam seeping up through the air and into the flowered wallpaper that is slowly dissolving under the strain. 

My biggest fear is that they will all stare. Much like they do out on the streets every time I walk out my front door. I often think I must have forgotten my pants the way they stare at me from head to toe, dark chocolate eyes boring into my straight brown hair, round blue-green eyes, my face of freckles and white skin. But to be actually naked in front of them. I didn’t know what would happen. Or what to expect. 

But that is what makes everything so wonderfully interesting here, even on the hard days. It is everything I am not. Everything America is not. And I am willing to try anything, and everything, at least once. How else will I ever understand America if I don’t have anything in which to compare? As I look down from my third-story apartment window to the crowded street below where men in salmon-colored ties sit drinking soju at the 7-Eleven, I still have to pinch myself, remind myself that this is real. This is my life. This is my world. These are my neighbors. These are even my friends. Like the woman in the corner market who gives me free sardines and face masks when I see her. Or the crazy Korean woman who loves to pinch my cheeks when I walk into her _kalbi_ restaurant. Or the woman at the bakery on the next block, always leaning her head on her elbows at the counter and staring out the window. She continues to speak Korean to me, hoping one day that I will suddenly, miraculously, understand. 

But it is here, at the public bath, where I have really become part of this world. As two foreign girlfriends and I step into the torrid water, the Koreans do not stare. 

Hazy steam wafts through the air. Satin-skinned women walk around without an ounce of clothing or hint of modesty, their only accessory a small tattered orange towel, wrapped around their heads of black silky hair. 

Old women with gnarled fingers and loose skin sit on marble cylinder-shaped seats scrubbing their daughters, who also scrub their daughters, an assembly line of skin becoming clean and raw and red beneath gritty loofahs. A gaggle of women, their legs hanging off pool ledges into sweltering hot water, gossip, share secrets, purse their lips, click their tongues, shake their heads, laugh hysterically. 

Voices of teenage girls break through the steam, their conversation a scherzo sonata of rising, falling, rising, falling before it crescendos and erupts into giggles. Young women sit alone, eyes closed, skin pulsing in the red-hot heat of the sauna. 

This is it, the moment I have finally become accepted into this eccentric and electric club known as Korea. It is in this instant that I am welcomed, sitting exposed waist-deep in steaming water with other Koreans who do not stare, but instead, simply, finally, pass me some soap. 

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Lindsay Nash is an American living and teaching in Gwangju, South Korea. She is a former newspaper reporter who now teaches English to elementary school children and does freelance photography and writing. She is the editor of a monthly newsletter for foreigners in Korea, Get in Gwangju. Her writing and photographs have also appeared in the Korea Herald. With her husband, she writes a blog about living in Korea.