Seoul: sauna and hot tub details

Very close to the Seoul Station is the Silloam FirePot Sauna (sauna and hot tubs and more). Also called Siloam Fomentation Sauna.
Note the Lonely Planet directions are terrible – check the map on the aforementioned website.

Rating: definitely worth it! Better than a Turkish Bath (hamam), perhaps not as good as a German Bad (spa) since the water parts are segregated.
Cost: W12,000/$10.60 between 8pm and 5am, W9,000/$8 between 5am and 8pm. Open 24 hours. I think your can stay for 12 hours, but no re-entry. (Costs a little less if only doing hot tubs)
No need to bring anything, but consider clean socks and underwear (feels much better afterwards when you are so clean).
I spent 2.5 hours there, trying out the various saunas and hot tubs.

So what is it? A large 5 story building with much more than saunas and hot tubs.
The locker rooms are on the ground floor, where you lock your shoes in small shoe-sized lockers, then exchange your ticket and shoe-locker-key for a regular-sized locker key, as well as loose fitting shorts and a T-shirt, and a towel (a hand towel in the west, but it’s a regular shower towel here in Korea!)

In the basement are sex-segregated hot tubs and showers. There are several hot tubs of different temperatures (inc. cold), using mineral water pumped from 300m underground. Some tubs have extras like jade, wormwood, charcoal or yellow mud (no, it doesn’t stain you yellow). In the middle of the room are showers (no stalls) or Japanese-style sit-down-on-a-stool showers. Swimsuits optional (nobody was wearing them on the men’s side, except for some masseurs – yes, there are 2 or 3 massage tables down there (extra cost)).

Upstairs above the locker rooms are 3 co-ed floors, and they’re the reason you get those shorts and t-shirt. Recall that you can stay for up to 12 hours…
Not just multiple saunas (see below), but also restaurants, snack bars and a cafe; barber shop, laundry service, Internet room, games room, singing room, mats to hang out on, yoga room, a room with exercise equipment, a massage room (extra cost), a sleeping room (with a hundred or so bunk beds), a snoring room (I kid you not) and more.

With that sleeping room, and it being open 24 hours, it’s possible to use it as a cheap hotel of sorts for one night, e.g. if arriving very late or you want to freshen up after having checked out of your hotel.

As for the saunas, there are many different ones 3F (the third floor) with different purported health benefits:

  • salt
  • jade
  • charcoal
  • yellow earth
  • infra-red (for some reason this one had a men’s and a women’s; all the others are co-ed)
  • ice-room (brrr but refreshing)
  • fomentation (steamy but not like a steam bath)

In some cases the materials are in the walls and ceilings; sometimes they are on the floor, e.g. in the salt room you walk and lie down on pebble-sized chunks of salt

There were young and old people, singles and couples; often young couples would lie together on mats in the large “atrium” outside of the saunas watching TV on their phones.

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