simple as sleeping

I went around in 2009 loudly proclaiming that living in South Korea wasn't all that different from living in the United States. Pardonable, in context. I'd lived there for a year and was sick and tired of it. Eagerly, I would point out that everybody drove on the right side of the road ("right" meaning both "opposite of left" and "correct"). The signs were mostly in English. They had stuff like coffee houses and convenience stores and pawn shops and shopping malls. They were fond of things like soccer and baseball and pizza and hamburgers. They showed American movies in theaters and had English-language radio stations and bookstores. Korea, to some extent, was little America.

Well, I'm here to amend that assertion. It turns out that my research wasn't complete. My opinions were somewhat premature. Even something as simple as sleeping, it turns out, is different in Korea.

The first thing I noticed when I got back to my folks' rambling three-bedroom tile-roofed stucco house in California was how well I slept at night.

                                                                                                                       from Tumblr

Now, sleep and I have had a rather torrid relationship. She first began to welch on me in 2005, when I compressed a disc in my back while tobogganing down a dike in Fargo, North Dakota. (Don't ask.) I was not to find a wholesome, restful night's sleep for two or three years after that incident. I reached some species of equilibrium after some visits to the chiropractor in early 2008, but I never really found true relief.

Matters were exacerbated in mid-2008 when I moved to Korea.

Why's that, you ask?

Because Korean mattresses are rock-hard, that's why.

Seriously. They're like iron. Adamantine. Obdurate. Stony. And all them other hard-sounding adjectives.

The dictionary defines the word mattress thus: "a large pad for supporting the reclining body, used as or on a bed, consisting of a quilted or similarly fastened case, usually of heavy cloth, that contains hair, straw, cotton, foam rubber, etc., or a framework of metal springs."

The reptilian part of my brain defines a mattress as "something soft and squishy that you sleep on and which bounces or yields when you sit down or jump on it."

Korean mattresses fit the first definition but utterly belie the second. I quickly learned not to leap or spring onto my mattress, or even to sit down on it in an abrupt fashion, for it was like leaping into the rubberized bed of a truck. The shock would bruise my brain and jar every joint in my body.

The reasons behind the excessive firmness of Korean mattresses are unclear. Tradition, I suppose, has something to do with it. Koreans only recently started using mattresses. A lot of them still sleep on the floor, on a thin futon-like pad with a blanket and a pillow. I suppose Korean mattresses were created with the hardness of a linoleum floor in mind, not the comfort of the sleeper. 

I'm beginning to entertain the notion that the Korean people harbor a deep-seated streak of masochism. They define mountain climbing and hiking as "climbing an endless series of uneven stone steps," for one thing. They eat mouth-searing, uvula-melting foods like gamjatang in summer, for another (and have the brass neck to claim that it cools them down). And now this: ossified mattresses. Forget everything you think you know about firmness and box springs and backaches; I've got you beat. I used to wake up feeling like some beefy prize fighter had used me for an accordion. My lumbar region throbbed like a bald-headed salesman hit on the head with a frozen salmon. It was miserable. I tossed and turned and ached and moaned for a year on Geoje Island, then went back and did it again in Bucheon. Things improved when I moved to my new place in Gwangnaru in late February of 2013, but it was the moment my head hit the pillow of my old bed in my old room in that old freakin' desert that I really conked out.

Now I sleep all through the night without stirring, and let me tell you: I never did that when I lived here before, when I was in high school. Some nights I'd wake up every hour with my mucus membranes drier than a Bedouin's beard, and have to ninja my way out to the kitchen for a glass of water. Not so anymore. It's like my pillow is soaked in chloroform. I'm lovin' it.

                                                                                                                www.dailyotter.org

Of course, the location of said pillow (in my old room in California, a familiar, peaceful setting) might have biased the experiment.

Anyway, I stand corrected. It's the little things that you tend to notice. Things like talking, traveling, cooking, eating, and (as we've seen) sleeping are all vastly different in Korea than they are anywhere else.

Now you know the rest of the story.