the only places where people could properly bathe.
“It looks closed,” Heju said.
“Let’s try it anyway,” I said hopefully.
We entered the motel’s substantial but utilitarian and dimly lit lobby, hoping a clerk might appear.
“Annyeonghaseyo yeogi nugugyeseyo!” (“Hello. Is anyone here?”) Heju called out.
Moments later, a woman appeared behind the window. She was friendly and engaging and informed us that rooms were only 25,000 won, which greatly pleased me — Oepo’s Motel Mafia hadn’t gotten to her yet.
The basement sauna and hot tubs, she said, opened at ten o’clock in the morning. Heju was happy — she loved saunas. When Heju is home in Daejeon, on most Saturdays or Sundays she’ll head with her mother to her local sauna, where they’ll spend many hours. When not making multiple forays into the sauna and hot tubs to shrivel and burn, she’ll rest, relax, and read in the common area. I suppose it’s a bit like Westerners spending all day at the local tennis or country club.
Carrying our bags, we trudged upstairs to our fifth-floor room. There was no elevator. At each floor we paused and peered down a long, spooky hallway, high-ceilinged and in shadows with musty red carpeted floors. “This place reminds me of the haunted hotel in The Shining,” I said. Had Jack Nicholson, as the crazed Jack Torrance, stuck his face, hideous, contorted and bug-eyed, out of a door and chortled evilly “Hereeeeeeee’s Johnnnnnyyyyyy!” it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least.
Our room was, let’s just say, worth the 25,000 won … well, maybe 15,000 … or even 10,000. It wasn’t that it was dirty or that there were stains on the walls. It simply felt very, very old, as if ten thousand people had slept in it before us. It was like one of those old rooming houses featured in a 1950s Hollywood movie, about a down-on-his-luck detective living in a seedy part of Los Angeles.
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