something to nibble on

So there I was, sitting in a cutesy Korean coffeeshop, with fish eating my feet.

It was the end of a typical weekend - the kind where I catch the first bus out and the last bus in and pack the day with various activities with friends in town. I had met one of my Korean friends downtown as she got off work for the evening, and she pulled out a booklet of advertisements to scan for coupons and places to go. We haltingly chatted in three languages with her Japanese co-worker about some of the shops, restaurants and spas in the book as she leafed through, and decided that we weren't all that hungry.

"Mmm, you want coffee and ... bread? This place has coffee, tea and bread," Yuni said, pointing to one of the pages. Her English is really pretty great, but there are plenty of times I miss what she's saying or only get part of it, and we hang out in part to trade language practice.

"Sure - sounds great," I shrugged, the ever-agreeable tourist. I wasn't quite sure what "bread" would turn out to be, but wherever my Korean friends want to go usually is great, so always happy to leave the decision-making up to them. Often, when you deal cross-cultures and cross-languages, you find yourself letting go of the small things and just seeing what happens - otherwise you'd be hammering out details for hours. She tore out the page and pocketed it, nodding.

We waved goodbye to the co-worker and ducked out into the cold night, then scuttled down a couple streets until we came to a nondescript set of stairs. Yuni pulled out the crumpled advertisement and consulted it a moment before scanning the signs plastered on the building.

"Here," she nodded.

We scurried up the stairs and through a door that opened into a warm, bright world buzzing with low conversations and smelling of tea and toast. Aproned staff bowed and greeted us, gesturing toward small tables surrounded by plush chairs in purple, green and gold. Bookshelves and faux trees were scattered among clusters of laughing young women. A few couples leaned close over steaming mugs, backlit by holiday lights and brick walls painted with foliage and shadows. It appeared to be pretty much the standard coffeeshop scene in Korea, with a bit of novel flair, and I was excited to have a potential new hangout downtown.

We set our stuff down and scoped out the menu, deciding on chamomile tea and the "toast bar" - basically a bunch of different breads set out by toaster ovens, butter and various jams. Koreans are pretty crazy about their toast, and there are entire shops devoted to just serving the crusty stuff. This seemed to be the coffeeshop version - aka, the "bread" Yuni had talked about. She went up to the counter to order for us and came back a few minutes later with our tea.

She said she also ordered something else, which I didn't quite understand, but I got that it would be ready when our number came up on a sign over on the wall - about 30 minutes. I wondered what could take 30 minutes in a coffeeshop, but again, it didn't seem worth figuring out sooner than necessary, so I smiled, said "Great," and asked her to pronounce "dog" and "crab" in Korean, which sound exactly the same to me but are supposedly different. Then we chatted about her sister's wedding and some translation work she'd done earlier that week for the U.S. Army in a court case for some soldiers who had gotten in a bar fight with some Koreans.

A few grammar and culture conversations down the line, number 178 was up, and I looked up at the counter, expecting to see a plate of something or other. But no, there was Yuni, calling my attention back and telling me to bring my bag. What? Um, okay ... maybe we had to go collect whatever it was from some other part of the restaurant? I grabbed my bag and headed after her, over to the side of the room where there were steps up to a long wooden platform. I hadn't really looked over here before but there weren't any other people except for the attendant, marking something on a clipboard and apparently giving Yuni some sort of instructions.

What the ...?

Yuni motioned me to take my shoes off at the bottom of the stairs and kept listening and nodding. I slipped off my clogs and padded up the stairs, curious. I could see some inset areas coming into view, and I thought for a moment that maybe they were like the floor tables I'd seen in other restaurants and this was a place for eating some sort of ceremonial food ... hmmm. But as I topped the stairs I realized that I was staring down into tanks of water ... and not just water - water full of small, darting fish. There were several cushions around the edges of the tanks, and sinks set into the floor a few feet away. I was totally bewildered.

Fish, fish ... oh yeah. I flashed back to the conversation we had had at Yuni's office about spa treatments and recalled a rather gross one about people submerging their feet into tanks of live fish, who eat away the dead skin. Kind of like a pedicure, a la Fear Factor. Wow. It all came clear. I had somehow missed the part about how we were going to get this spa treatment. But here I was, in this mod little coffeeshop in downtown Daegu, about to have my feet eaten off by a writhing mass of sea creatures. And it was a bought and done deal from a very sweet friend, and apparently quite the rage by the hip 20- and 30-somethings, judging by the crowd ... so hey, what the heck. When in cute coffeeshops with feet-eating fish in Korea ...

So yeah ... you can check out my pictures (just happened to have my camera along, by some great fortune). I really did it. And here's a Washington Post article with more information on the treatment, though about a Tokyo spa, and a link to the 나무그늘 site (the Daegu coffeeshop where I went) - though this site is all in Korean.

As for my experience, well ... learned the words for "creepy" and "tickle" in Korean, and basically tried not to think too much about it, except for realizing that this was perhaps the strangest 10 minutes of my life.