An American in Europe

21 September

The Turkish Bath - Wear it proud

This story you are about to read tops the list as the weirdest thing I have ever done in my life. It’s a little long, but worth reading – trust me.

Click “read more” to find out what we did tonight in Paris!

The girls and I went to a Turkish Bath in Paris tonight and it ain’t your typical day spa.

The bath is in a mosque on the other side of town from our apartment. We went without any idea of what to expect other than the short description in Monica’s guide book.

I almost didn’t go because you have to take it all off, and I wasn’t too keen on stripping down in front of my friends. I know that Europeans are less modest than Americans and I didn’t think I was ready for that yet.

But, in keeping with European spirit, I went along with the option of backing out when I got there.

When we got to the mosque, we couldn’t find the bath. At the bath’s address sat a café. We went into the café and looked around but all we saw were lots of people eating.

Lexi asked the man at the cash register, and he guided us to a door behind the pastry display.

Beyond the door was a small waiting room with couches. The room was dark and painted with rich colors like blue and purple.

Then there was another door.

We all looked at each other, shrugged, and went in.

If the subject of nudity bothers you, you might want to stop reading here.

Behind door number two was a large, dimly-lit room with marble floors and pillars. The high ceiling had many arches that came down to the marble columns, and it was painted beautifully in patterns of gold, blue, purple and red.

It looked like a Middle Eastern palace.

In the middle, naked women lay on tables, while Muslim women massaged them. Sitting around the outside walls, other nude women lounged on mats waiting for their turn.

I had never seen so many naked people in my life.

Uh huh.

We gingerly handed over our credit cards to order a massage, an exfoliation and tea.

Mind you, nobody spoke English, and Lexi had a hard time reading the French words – they don’t exactly prepare you to go to a Turkish Bath in French school.

While we were paying, some women in the back started screaming in some gutteral yell. Like, "yiyiyiyiyiyiyi!"
We had no idea what were were getting ourselves into.

We were handed tickets for our massages and little cups of brown, caramel looking stuff. They called it soap, but it didn’t look nor smell like soap.

Then we forked over an additional 4 Euro for towels, and carried them, the little cups of brown stuff and tickets past the naked women to the locker room.

We undressed in the locker room and headed back to the main room – towels wrapped tightly around ourselves. There was a long line for massages, so we headed to the back toward another door.

Behind door number 3 was a hot room filled with steam.

Once our eyes adjusted to the steamy room, we saw a spacious marble-column setting with large raised areas to sit. And we saw more naked women of all shapes, sizes and colors.

Each raised area had some buckets and a faucet to fill them up.

The women were washing each other and rinsing off with white buckets. Some women sprawled out on their towels, while others chatted quietly, scrubbed or rinsed.

We soon discovered a labyrinth of steam rooms, showers and baths all filled with nude women.

It was a scene straight out of some hetero-male’s fantasy.

In the very back was another room so hot you could barely breathe. It was much hotter than any sauna you’d find in the United States. A blue pool sat ominously in the back.

Monica and I soon discovered that if you can stand the heat long enough to walk to the pool, the water was quite cool. It took Lexi three tries of running into the room and back out before she would trust us that it wasn’t so bad in the water.

Upon sitting in the pool, the cooked-in-an-oven feeling goes away, and relaxation takes its place.

We sat in the pool for a bit, and then Lexi figured out that we were supposed to wash with the brown stuff and then get exfoliated.

So we went to our own raised area to sit, and put the slimy, caramel-looking stuff all over us. Then we rinsed off with the white buckets like the other women were doing. Suzelle was pretty chill about the whole thing, but Lexi and I couldn’t stop laughing.

I kept imagining what my friends back home would think if they could see this.

Plus, the brown stuff made the marble slippery, so I was sliding all over the place.

After that, I found myself watching as Lexi lay on a table in yet another room, while a Muslim woman wiped her down with a harsh cloth.

She was being exfoliated. (For all you men, that means taking off the top layer of skin.)

I reminded her of our first meeting in a dorm elevator in Chicago, before Medill began, and asked her if she would have ever guessed that one day we’d be doing this!

Next it was my turn.

I hopped up onto the table, which was filled with hot water, and lay there nude while the woman scrubbed me down.

Breasts, derriers and other body parts floated casually by me as if their owners hadn’t a care in the world.

And I thought, “Mom, if only you could see me now.”

After the exfoliation, the four of us sat on our towels, which were soaked by that point, and waited for our massages.

Thank God Lexi knows French, or we would have never gotten our turn.

The women chatted away in Arabic while they massaged the oily bodies.

We sipped sweet tea and watched. We even saw one woman get waxed all over. Even there. Rip. Ouch.

In the United States, the guest lays under a sheet in a private room during a waxing or massage. Forget that. At this place, you better love thy body, because it all hangs out for everyone to see.

By the time we were massaged, we had been there for two hours, and we were all pretty comfortable with the nudity thing. We had even taken to speculating on another woman’s apparent implants.

Tonight, we emerged on the streets of Paris, wet-haired, mellow and a little less modest.
posted at 04:06:27 on 09/21/04 by ajluvsu - Category: General

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