How hot can you cook without cooking yourself?

In Korea, dining and washing both require cooking yourself.

In Korea, when you eat, you cook it yourself. You sit down by the seashore. They bring you boiling broth. You place it on a flame and boil and boil until the fish is soupy and the soup is fishy.

Each bite is special. Each bite is prepared just so. (This explains why Candace eats her fajitas just so, lining each tortilla with sauteed onion and then pepper and then steak and then salsa, so each bite bites just right.)

You eat your kimchee wrapping up a bite of rice, for the perfect combination of salty and sugary, spicy and chewy.

You eat your eel wrapped in sesame leaf, wrapped in romaine leaf, filled with spicy tofu- miso paste with a slice of garlic with a slice of pepper with slices of ginger -- all in one bite.

All in one just so bite.

In Korea, when you bathe, you cook yourself -- in hotter and hotter water, sometimes with salt and sometimes baking soda. This dish is called jimjilbang.
Jimjilbang comes in many courses.

The first course of jimjilbang is removing your shoes and securing them in #257. Then removing your clothes and securing them in a separate locker, also #257. (Shoes and clothes must be locked in separate lockers in Korea.) You cover your head with a towel. You tie the towel in buns at either side of your head (so your head is just so). You dress yourself in a toga t-shirt and loose culottes. (Don't wrap too tight so the salt seeps in. You need to be just so.)

The course concludes when you see Candace at the foot bath.

At the foot bath, you soak your feet in salt water to loosen your foot skin. You walk on hot rocks to loosen your foot muscles.

Jimjilbang continues with yellow ochre room. The clay hut of yellow ochre room and the ionized heat of yellow ochre room remove the tension of city from your skin and the tension of the city from your body and the tension of the city from your brain.

The next jimjilbang is hotter and saltier. You place yourself prone atop yellow bricks of Himalayan salt glowing clear with heat. As they say, it's not the heat, it's the salt.

To tenderize your corpus and remove the toxins, you "foment" at 80 Celsius amidst red bricks. You freeze at 10 Celsius amidst blue tiles and jelly fish. You foment and freeze alternating every five minutes. It's like basting a Thanksgiving turkey.

To tenderize your brain, jimjilbang doses you with Wave Dream Room and 52 Degree Pyramid Room (the angle of the walls, not the degree of the temperature) and Electron Light Room and even the much renowned Mind Sound Room, with patented Korean rays to induce meditation and sometimes prestidigitation. (It's Zamfir muzak from walls that flow from neon yellow to neon blue to neon red to neon yellow to . . . )

All these courses of jimjilbang desiccate the typical western human (while humecting his skin to mouth watering salty smooth softness). Like a dry turkey, the typical western human at this point in jimjilbang requires rehydration with multi-mushroom stew and bone-dry beer.

Now your jimjilbang is ready to cook. Boil it in salt at 47 degrees for 4 minutes. Bake it in baking soda at 57 degrees for 5 minutes. Bubble in "bade" at 67 degrees for 6 minutes. Dissolve in steam (77 degrees).

Thus is one cooked in Korea at jimjilbang. Koreans call it relaxing. I call it dissolving. Who wants to join me tomorrow?