Public bathing in foreign lands

Republished from The Jade Journal

The funny thing about Turkish baths is how decidedly non-bath-centric they are.

This is not to imply that they are not cleansing. Indeed, afterwards I felt as though my very soul had been purified.

But they don’t involve public bathing so much as sweating and steam and burly men with mustaches rubbing you down and anointing you with oil. And yes – let’s address this, as it’s bound to come up eventually – that sounds pretty gay.

But it’s not. It’s awesome. Which is not to say that gay stuff can’t be awesome but I just don’t have time to get into the transitive property right now.

Here’s what happens – you change out of your clothes and into a little towel thing and head into the main room. This is a large open room with a circular marble slab in the middle and bathing stations around the outside of the circle. The slab is somehow heated to a really high temperature (Possibly magic?). Everything is silent and still. Unless there is a noise, in which case it reverberates around the room for the next five minutes. It is here, as you’re laying on the marble slab and beginning to heavily perspire while the Muslim call to prayer softly echoes outside and you don’t quite know what happens next, that you really start to wonder what your life is right now and how you came to be in it.

Then all such thoughts are swept from your mind as the burly men with mustaches arrive and soapsuds come out of nowhere and suddenly you are getting roughly exfoliated by a dude. After you come to terms with this, it is a relatively peaceful experience until they douse you with cold water and demand a tip.

Then, if you sprang for the luxury treatment, you are taken into another room, placed on a massage table, and told to relax while another burly man plays “Find the Knots of Tension and Make Them Explode!” After a lot of this, some scented oils and some stereotypical massage karate chopping, he also demands a tip.

If you want, you can go hang out on the slab some more and think about your life, but at that point I was tired and really wanted a gyro. So I got one. And it was the most relaxed I’ve ever been while eating a gyro.