Sorry, teacher, a fish ate my feet

Attention! I have actually found something that rivals the naked massage as the weirdest experience of my life!!! Brace yourself, you might not believe this one!

Have you ever heard of "Doctor Fish"? Me either, until about 2 weeks ago, when I was talking to my student about pedicures and she told me I should go to Dr. Fish instead. No, it's not a medical professional with an unfortunate name, these are real fish. So some friends and I were having "day of beauty" last weekend (Korea can make you feel hideous; everyone is 5'5'', size 2 and has perfect hair and skin and make-up and clothes all the time. Not that I even CARE about that stuff most of the time, but it gets to you!) so we decided to give these little swimmers a try.

First of all, Dr Fish are always located in a cafe, and you have to buy a drink in order to "use" the fish. Now this might be ok in a cafe in Amsterdam, where most of the "cafe fare" will mellow you out, but that's a no-no here, so they get you all jacked up on caffeine. Then you go up to a little basin and wash your feet, and then make your way over to the nicely decorated stone ponds. Full of fish. Hundreds of them. And you stick your feet in the pond. And then you IMMEDIATELY jerk your feet out of the water (often splashing your fellow fishers) because the minute your skin touches the water, hundreds of hungry little fish swim up and start nibbling on your tootsies!! And that's the point!!

Yup, Dr Fish are just little fish that eat dead skin. So for $2 you can dip your feet in their pond for as long as you want, and all those little fish will gnaw away at the tasty morsels that cover your feet and ankles. And it's a good thing you can stay for as long as you want, because it probably took at least 20 minutes for us to get comfortable enough to actually submerge the entire foot and leave it in there for any length of time. It's an excellent work-out for the reflexes!

If you have a really good imagination, you can close your eyes and almost pretend that you've got your feet in a pool full of tapioca beads, that keep bumping into you. But the tapioca beads have tails, and occasionally sharp teeth (we called them "the zingers"). And they tickle like hell! Unfortunately, as soon as someone says, "here, stick your feet in this pool of fish so they can eat your skin," any element of imagination rushes from your mind, and all you can focus on is "fish. Feet. My feet. Fish eating MY feet. WTF?!" The heels weren't bad, because they're not quite as sensitive, but when my arches finally got in there, oh man did that tickle! And the TOES! Fish nibbling the tips of my toes, fish tails brushing my toes, fish swimming between my toes. And when you look down into the water, the only thing you can see below your ankles is a mass of little gray fins and tails and scales, and their unnaturally huge mouths groping for an empty spot! Images of biology videos of an egg being swarmed by thousands of sperm were flashing through my mind.



I think we were there for about an hour and a half in the end. Towards the end, after I had come to terms with the whole situation and started talking more and focusing less, it almost felt like pins and needles, only without the excrutiating pain associated with a sleeping foot waking up. Although you'd still get the occasional zinger, just to remind you where you were. And my feet did feel smoother afterwards. It made us feel very Korean (this is actually a popular thing to do!) and thus stunningly beautiful (ha!) but it was a good laugh and a relaxing way to spend a chilly Saturday afternoon.

And hey, guess where the concept started? Yup, in spas, where they have pools of Dr Fish to submerge your entire body. Naked, of course. Maybe I'll look for that next...

No way in hell.