Eyebrow waxing...in Korea???

Before deciding to come live in Korea, we had some concerns - will we like it there? What will we eat? How will we learn the language? etc. However, none of those questions even come close to the most important question - will we be able to get our eyebrows waxed? This may not seem like a hugely important question to many of you, but when we both have been getting our eyebrows waxed religiously every 4-6 weeks since we were 18 - its a pretty important part of our lives! We had heard that Korea was fairly westernized, so we figured it shouldn't be that hard, right? haha Little do we know...it was damn near impossible.


The first step in trying to obtain our goal was to ask around. We didn't meet any girls here that had it done; however, they all had a friend that did. It's quite mysterious how they could never contact that friend to find out where. So when the "friend plan" failed, we had to try a different route. So we started by stopping by salons and asking, which apparently the word for waxing is "waxe" - tough to pronouce. We actually found one salon that basically said they didn't, but there was a place across the street that did. So we went across the street - they didn't, but they did direct us back to our first location saying that they did wax. Whatever, so that plan failed.


Our next stop was Beijing. We were staying at this beautiful 5 star hotel - WITH A SPA! The spa even said on their website that "waxing services available" - great! We are getting our eyebrows waxed in Beijing. There, they told us we could get them done, but we had to pay for the "Eyebrow Reconstruction Package" - interesting. So $35 and a clean face later...our eyebrows still were not waxed. Did they look better? Yes because they ladies plucked and razored them. But they still were not waxed. When we told the lady we wanted them "waxed" her response was "wax? no no - that's too dangerous." Really lady? Because I'm pretty sure that people do it ALL the time in the US. Whatever.


So onto Daegu. In Daegu there is a US military base called Camp Walker. Everyone says that you can go to any military base and get anything you want done right outside because all the surrounding businesses cater to the military. So we found Camp Walker. First task. Then we found 1 salon - guess what...no waxing. Shocking.


Finally, we decided screw this...we knew in Itaewon (Seoul) everyone was foreign and we were bound to be able to get it done. We had done a little internet research and there were no straight answers, except from this one lady's very nice blog that said something about The Green Turtle, which is right above Quizno's. She mentioned that it was extremely expensive though, so its better to go to the military base...hmm...because we had so much luck with that last time. She had also mentioned that many places will wax OFF your ENTIRE eyebrow. So not only did we have to worry about finding a place, but now we needed to add in the fact that they might take all of them off. Geez.


Anyway, so Saturday, we decided this is getting to be a life or death situation. We have been living in Korea for 3 months with catepillars growing at a steady rate on our face. We are pretty sure that we were not going to be able to see soon, if this problem did not get fixed. So we booked our $20 KTX ticket's and headed up to Seoul. We found The Green Turtle and guess what...our eyebrows got waxed and they couldn't look better! Yippee!! And...why do people think $10 is expensive? At home, we paid $20. We know - you have to add in the price of the ticket to get there, but it was worth every dime. We actually decided to throw in a pedicure as well so now both our feet and eyebrows look great. We feel like humans again and it was nice to get a bit of pampering.


So for any poor souls that are reading this and looking for eyebrow waxing in Korea...just suck it up and go to The Green Turtle. It was worth it.