Baths, Part II

Since not much was going yesterday, I decided to try out the sulfur baths and see what the stink was all about. Ok, so I finally figured out how to spell sulfur for those who pointed such nonsense out to me.

I went to the baths that someone had shown to me earlier in the week. These baths are mainly for tourists and locals, generally men, who are more interested in a happy ending than bathing. In fact, if you stand around long enough, surely a local man will go in with some overdressed woman. Therefore, in addition to taking a bath, I was officially doing research.

The downside of these baths is that they are all private, meaning you get your own little room with a little tub or a square tiled pool filled with stinky piping hot water, a massage table, and in some more expensive rooms, a small sauna. It’s great if you have company with you, but if you’re alone, it’s hard to say how long you’ve been there and whether it’s time to go or not. I asked for the rub down which is essentially someone scrubbing me with a wickedly itchy and harsh wool mitten to shed off layers of old skin. I am sure you’re thinking that a mitten can’t be that bad but the lady scrubbed so hard that blackened chunks (oh thank you New York for all the pollution) of skin were shedding from me left and right. It was actually kind of gross. And for some reason, she scrubbed my butt like there was no tomorrow, I wasn’t sure if she had some sort of S&M undertones to her scrubbing technique or if my butt was really dirty. Then she soaped me up and I rested a little bit more in the sulfur bath.

The whole thing was a little disappointing because in Turkey, the scrubbing and soaping is part of a ceremony and the women scrubbing and soaping really go nuts. Here it was monotonous work done by a woman in her underwear who seems to scrub down tourists every day. There was no ceremony, no umph, nothing really. But I left squeaky clean and pink like a piglet.

There are a couple of pics that I took for you all.