Olympic Spa

I’ve been having a rough go of it recently. Someone stole the dill plant off of my front porch. A woman called me the “c-word” over a parking spot. I had to give a vendor a verbal beat-down, follow it up with an ultimatum and then threaten his job. After that, a suspected murderer was tackled and handcuffed by a dozen armed police officers at my place of business during opening hours. There’s more, but reliving those events in words is almost as stressful as doing it all over again.

It’s my belief that when disappointment, frustration and exhaustion all make play-dates for the same day/same week/same month, its time to take action. The human spirit can only take so much before collapsing in on top of itself.

So last Saturday I went to Olympic Spa in Koreatown, where I (quite literally) washed that job/that mess in the kitchen/that man, right out of my hair.

I always get the traditional Akasuri scrub ($35) and 30 minute mini-massage ($35) when I visit this spa. A friend turned me on to it, and although I’ve had other treatments, nothing else provides the same value for the price. And as I’m sure you can imagine, for that price, Olympic Spa is what you might call “no frills.”

It’s also no clothes.

So there I was: tired, frustrated, exhausted and naked at the Korean spa, surrounded by dozens of other tired, frustrated, naked women, waiting to be scrubbed and beaten. Beaten.

After sweating in both the jade-lined sauna and the Finnish dry sauna, soaking in the mugwort tea and a brief stint in the (very!) cold pool, I was called for my treatment. The Akasuri scrub is a vigorous rub-down with silk mitts. The silk sounds nice, but it’s more akin to a Brillo pad than soft sheets. And the massage isn't one of those "little to the left - right there - no there! - ahhh, yeahhhh" kind of places. You get what you get, and its good. And I'm not about to argue with a woman who wears a black bra and panty for a uniform.

I thoroughly enjoyed it – especially since the woman only broke the skin once, reinforcing my belief that this is truly the only place in LA where you can really be clean.

Olympic Spa
Koreatown
3915 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Phone 323.857.0666
Fax 323.857.0535
www.olympicspala.com