Spas, soaking, hot springs. I love them all, and earlier this month drove to a Korean spa in the northwestern corner of Toronto, a non-descript place in an industrial park near Finch and Dufferin. My friend Alicia knows about spots like this from having been a production designer in film, which means she’s explored odd corners of various cities while working on movies. She tells me there’s a Russian club not far from the Korean spa. When you sit down at one of their many circular tables, all with white tablecloths, they bring you a big jug of water. Except that that it isn’t water, it’s vodka. Things start to get happy.

Walking through the door of the spa, you find an office ahead and slightly to the left behind a plate glass window, through which you can see shelves of tee-shorts and shorts in matched but faded colours. These are their uniforms, and you’re going to wear one when you go in the saunas. Behind you and further to the left are banks of lockers where, before doing anything else, you leave your shoes and take your locker key to the office. After a wait, a woman appears, in our case one who spoke almost as little English as I speak Korean. She checked us in, giving out the uniforms and tiny grey towels, and charged the pleasant daily rate of $33.90, including tax.

The reason I can write such specific details is that as well as enjoying myself, I was working, taking notes, doing research for the novel I’m currently writing. So I thought I’d write a little today about doing onsite research (as well about as saunas and hot springs). Obviously, I’m not going to write a paragraph in the novel in which “you turn left, then you look right…” But I like getting the details right, so if my protagonist comes inside, I want to make sure she sits down on a short bench, which I can now describe, and politely takes off her shoes. 

Here’s something else: I also like to enjoy doing my research. If I needed to go to a prizefight to research some writing, I would go, and try to remove my hands from over my eyes occasionally to be able to describe the exact look of two people beating the crap out of each other. I would note the amount of blood that appeared when and where, how it smelled, how the sweat smelled, the sputum that was sent at what distance from the ring, and whether or not I thought something was fake, and why. 

Yet that brings up a couple of things. If you enjoy your research, your enjoyment is going to be conveyed in the writing, and sometimes readers need a pleasant break in the action. Writers make our poor protagonists face trauma, conflict, fear and loss, otherwise known as drama. But too much conflict can feel relentless. Sometimes you need a change of tone, even when villains in spandex are threatening to destroy the world. I wouldn’t be able to change the tone with a prizefight chapter, since it’s not the sort of thing I enjoy, and my readers would sense that. 

But a spa visit? I can do that. Looking ahead, outlining my novel, I know I’m going to need a short chapter before too long in which I can release a little tension. Or my protagonist can. I don’t enjoy writing where none of my characters ever laughs, and my readers don’t either. I knew my protagonist would laugh while relaxing at a spa because I knew that I would, making a day trip with a friend.

There’s also this: if you actually check out a specific place when writing a novel instead of relying on memory, books, the internet and archives, things might happen that you couldn’t have made up. I’m always looking for a little bit of that as well, since surprise in writing is invaluable. 

When I was in the Amazon researching an earlier novel, I took my young son to a camp deep in the rainforest, and we met a man who showed such weird degree of interest in him that I pegged the guy as a pedophile, and spent the trip keeping him away from my son. In real life, nothing happened. But it did in the novel, providing a climax, so the trip was scary but extremely useful in all sorts of ways, and that included hearing the eerie cries of howler monkeys. (Years later, I still worry about other kids this who might have been harmed by this man, but I never learned his real name, since it was clear from the start that he’d lied when introducing himself.)

So I walked into the relaxing, entirely non-pedophilic Seoul Jimjilbang Spa, which is also called the Seoul Zimzilbang Korean Sauna online. There, I found that the women’s change room is to the left of the front desk, the men’s to the right. The women’s is very basic, looking like a high school locker room, or at least the school locker rooms I remember from long ago, except that it was clean. Everything there is very clean and tidy. 

At the front desk, you get an electronic key to your clothes locker on a coiled plastic bracelet that you wear on your wrist. That’s the one modern feature. Otherwise, you get naked and stash your clothes in the locker, and have a shower in locker room-style showers before going into the pretty basic soaker tubs. There are two, a square tiled hot tub and a cold plunge pool. There are few things I love more than a good hot soak, so I had a great time resting there while taking useful mental notes. (Non-writing tip: If you go to the Jimjilbang, bring shampoo, soap and a proper towel, since they’re not provided.) 

After your soak, you get into your uniform and go out into the common area beyond the women’s and men’s change rooms. The first room has a basic food service counter and tables, as well as wooden benches to rest on, where a few people were lying down, one of them reading. You reach the saunas through a door at the far end, and there you’re able to choose from among several saunas set around the perimeter of the heated foyer. Outside many of them is a sign in caps, speaking of not being able to make things up: “NO NEWSPAPERS ALLOWED IN THE SAUNAS.”

The walls of each sauna are studded with different types of rocks promising different health benefits. One of them says the stones will dissolves pollutants, bacteria and heavy metals in your body, and will heal cold symptoms as well as having anti-aging effects. The temperatures listed on electronic signs above the doors range from 40° to 100° Celsius. I ducked into the 100° room briefly, and it felt and smelled like cedar-y Finnish sauna, or perhaps hell. Mainly we hung out at 43°, lying on mats as we felt tense muscles turn to jelly, and periodically going into a different room with a wall of ice to cool down. It’s literally a wall-sized sheet of ice, looking like the inside of a freezer that badly needs defrosting. It was heaven. 

In my novel, I’ve given my protagonist a friend who tries to take care of her and drives her to spas. That’s “spas” plural, since I’ve already drafted an early chapter set in the other Korean spa I know about in Greater Toronto, which means the other Korean spa Alicia knows about. Unlike the one in the west end, the Go Place in suburban Markham is huge and luxe, with enormously high ceilings and architectural pillars. In the women-only section, there are three large warm bubbling jacuzzis, a cold plunge pool and a steam room. Beside it are showers with scented shampoos and body wash, and nearby are Japanese toilets that do everything but sing to you. 

Outside the Go Place women’s area is a pair of huge common lounges where both women and men wear their uniforms—which are crisp and new—and lie on reclining lounge chairs. Some lounges lie under infra-red lights. People can also play cards as they sit on the groupings of sofas and armchairs, or gossip quietly with friends, or scroll through the feeds on their phones. The Jimjilbang was fairly empty when we were there. Go Place seldom is. (I’ve been forced to go back several times for additional research.) Around the perimeter of the lounge areas are saunas lined with semi-precious stones: the jade room, the amethyst room, the agate room and so on. 

People can also use the gym, book the corporate meeting room or duck into the computer room, go upstairs for massages and treatments, or head into the very good restaurant. With lunch, Go Place is two or three times the price of the Jimjilbang sauna, although I always feel very relaxed after an afternoon there. I also felt relaxed after visiting the bargain sauna, so there isn’t really a down side to either of them.

Yet I went to the more modest spa because I think it might prove useful to my novel in a couple of ways. One is the change of tone that I mentioned. It also might work to send my protagonist to the second spa later in the novel to show the economic worries that she and her friends are beginning to face. They’re increasingly strapped for money, and in a novel you don’t want to illustrate that by quoting statistics. Instead, you show a downturn in the way your characters live.

Or maybe you don’t. When writing a previous novel, I learned not to get too attached to my research. One time, I did a heroic amount of reading and travel, hitting multiple cities and their archives before sitting down to write. Afterward, I tried to cram it all in, and the novel grew so long and boring I had to cut it way, way down. Now I do most of my research while I’m writing, when it might occur to me, for instance, that my characters need to go to a more basic Korean spa than the one they’d visited earlier. 

Yet I also have to remain open to the idea that my characters would rather go back to their favorite bar than go to another spa. Now that I’ve put the idea of a prizefight into their heads, maybe they’ll want to go to one of those. Catharsis and all that. I know at this point to let them go where they want. To go, myself, wherever the writing takes me. That’s another reason to do things I like when I’m doing my research. If I don’t use my notes, I’ve had a bunch of fun going to places I enjoyed visiting.

The fact is, I like spas and hot springs so much, I once thought of writing a non-fiction book about them. Mainly hot springs. There aren’t many in Canada, although I spent a relaxing afternoon once at the hot springs in Banff, which was a change from the hyper-ambition blasting out of every corner of the Banff Media Festival. When we lived in Mexico, its many volcanoes meant there were hot springs throughout the central cordillera. During the dry season, we’d often drive north out of Mexico City to spend the weekend a hot spring resort called Tequisquiapán. That got us out of the severe pollution blanketing the capital and into heated pools. 

While living in Brazil, we usually went to Chile in January, in this case to get out of Rio’s summer heat. Lots of volcanoes in Chile, too. That meant you could drive along a country road in either Chile or Mexico and often see an arrow pointing to “termas,” or “balneario.” Turn onto a dirt track, and you’d find some wonderful rustic places in the middle of nowhere. 

Maybe I’ll write about them later, especially the island in the far south of Chile called Llancahué. When driving down the coastal highway—a “penetration road” at the time, meaning chancy—you’d stop in a town up the coast to buy an ad on a local radio station. The station would broadcast your message, telling the hotel the time and date you’d arrive at a rocky inlet on the mainland. They’d send an outboard to pick you up, and you ended up at a place where dolphins and killer whales played off a beach and 50° water bubbled up through the rocks.

We used to travel all over the place before my husband’s multiple sclerosis set in hard. Yet researching my (mostly) Toronto novel has been a great pleasure, with serendipitous adventures along the way. I’ve never been to Korea, but in the course of my research, I’ve discovered a few of the simple pleasures of the country. 

Here’s the last one. There’s a freezer in the Seoul Jimjilbang filled with Korean popsicles. When we felt a little overheated, Alicia got blueberry, I got strawberry, and we agreed they were the best popsicles we’ve ever had. 

My new novel will be published… eventually. In the meantime, you can get my latest, Far Creek Road, here.