Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble
“Let’s go to the hammam today,” Amanda declared over breakfast. Some readers might recall our guest blog entry a few months back from Laura Fitzgerald, describing a rather gruesome trip to a hammam in Fes. Her tale instilled a level of trepidation about venturing through the doors of the steamy local baths that I’ve been unable to overcome. The hammam has actually become a sort of mythical place in my mind where one is manhandled, naked, among staring Moroccan women, skin raked off with a sandpapery gommage glove, too hot water poured over exposed pink flesh followed by the inevitable pounding by the house masseuse. Perhaps not the ideal way to issue in a new day. But hey, this is Amanda’s vacation and we’re looking to push our comfort zones a bit, so I agreed to the excursion.
Hanan, our cleaning woman and protector, set off to the souks in search of the necessary hammam accoutrements. She returned with two plastic buckets, bubblegum pink flip-flops (how she managed to find size 10s in a country where women top out at around five feet and have shoes the length of my hand attests to her myriad skills), gommage gloves, a plastic bag filled with gooey black soap, several softer hand mitts for regular soaping, a plastic mat that might have been a yoga mat but for its lurid palm-tree print, and a pair of small plastic bowls – also pink – used for scooping water from the larger buckets. We packed up our own towels, shampoo and moisturizer and headed over to the Ben Slimane hammam, which is just around the corner from our house. One of my favorite smells on the route to and from our house is the clean, soapy smell that emanates from the hammam, along with that of the burning wood used to heat its chambers. Most days, there’s a wagon mounded with wood chips parked at its door, its mule lazily chomping on a pile of greens.
Upon entering, we paid 8 dirhams apiece and were ushered into a changing room, where we stripped to our skivvies and then modestly tied oversized white bath towels around our bodies before dropping off our bags at the “coat check” (another 20 dirhams). Modesty didn’t last long. No sooner had we entered the first steam room, where we’d been led by a rotund headscarved woman of indeterminate middle age, than she grabbed our towels and unfurled us like two reluctant flags. A small naked boy of about five looked up at us in horror. “Where have these two white aliens descended from, and mummy make them disappear,” his look said.
It’s worth noting that the temperature outside (and inside our indoor-outdoor house) is in the low 60s these days, and the nights are downright freezing. Amanda has gamely doubled up her socks and donned a djellabah – this is a girl with significant NOLS experience, e.g., she knows how to stave off hypothermia – but even so, we were both looking forward to the warmth of the hammam. Within minutes of entering the first steamy room, our body temperature had gone up at least 10 degrees, and we weren’t sure if the heat or the embarrassment had turned our skin Marrakech red.
“It’s kinda like learning how to take a bath again, isn’t it?” Amanda asked as the various hammam staffers and clients directed us to fill our buckets from the scalding tap, cop a squat on our yoga mat, and then slather our now perspiring bodies with gooey black soap. An eighteen-year-old girl with perfect skin and perky breasts of the sort that inspire both envy and nostalgia cozied up to us and offered to help with the gommage, or luffahing, that follows the black soap application. At this point, we were both sitting cross-legged on the mat in a room with about 20 other woman of all shapes and ages in various stages of bath. Steam rose from the tile floor and from the buckets of water littered about the room. For the first time in Morocco, we felt part of a community of women and instead of averting their eyes and shrinking away from us as most do on the streets, they adopted us, admittedly like two curiosities, into their inner sanctum. Stripped down to our undies, maybe we’re all just girls who relish a break from the constraints of the outside world and the chance to chat and laugh without inhibition.
After Amanda and I had done what we thought was a thorough sluffing, we started in on the shampoo, only to have a very large, doughy woman with the most enormous pillowy breasts I’ve ever seen – terrifying, to be frank – wag her finger at us and insist on continuing the gommage that we’d, in her mind, not properly finished. Furious debate over the price of said services ensued between the marshmellowy woman and our nubile friend, who was incensed about the apparent attempt to gauge the newbies. I wanted to call off the negotiations, mostly because the verbal battle seemed so incongruous in this world of steamy relaxation, but to be honest, I was so over heated I could hardly think. Up first, I succumbed to her rough ministerings. Did I mention that she was fully naked, by the way? We thought the underwear rule was sacrosanct! First she grabbed my arm, driving my hand into her tummy-breast rolls, and began raking the gommage glove down my inner arm, pausing every now and then to show me the vast quantities of skin she’d removed. Not sure whether to be further embarrassed at the condition of my skin, or impressed with her work, I responded with a simple, “oh la, la,” which seemed to please her. Next, she flipped me onto my back and I found my head resting on her inner thigh as she worked away on my stomach and sides. This, I felt, is the crucial test: fight or flight . . . or just succumb. I opted to embrace the ludicrous scenario, imagining myself melting into the soap-scented vapors, and grateful that I’d been first to go “under the glove.” “Poor Amanda,” I thought, who’d watched the proceedings in silent dismay, “you’re up next!” Her efforts at distracting our glove-wielding tormentor by scurrying to and from the tap, filling every water bucket in sight with boiling water, failed, and soon she was splayed out on the steaming tiles with the woman’s knee on her sternum. Needless to say, the No Cameras Allowed policy was a real bummer, but something tells me this experience will remained burned into our mind’s eye.
You know the story about the frog, who, when put in a pot of tepid water that is then heated to boiling, will remain in the pot unable to move until he has been poached? Well, somewhere between the last scrape of the gommage glove and the dousing with a bucket of hot water that followed, Amanda’s and my eyes locked and we knew it was time to get out of the steam room or we risked boiling ourselves. We rushed to the outer changing room, where it was an easy 40 degrees cooler and lay back against the benches, huffing and puffing as if we’d just run a 10K. A number of the women who moments earlier were laughing with us in the baths, were now getting dressed and reaffixing headscarves, their body language indicating that we’d re-crossed the line and our old roles resumed.
Hanan, our cleaning woman and protector, set off to the souks in search of the necessary hammam accoutrements. She returned with two plastic buckets, bubblegum pink flip-flops (how she managed to find size 10s in a country where women top out at around five feet and have shoes the length of my hand attests to her myriad skills), gommage gloves, a plastic bag filled with gooey black soap, several softer hand mitts for regular soaping, a plastic mat that might have been a yoga mat but for its lurid palm-tree print, and a pair of small plastic bowls – also pink – used for scooping water from the larger buckets. We packed up our own towels, shampoo and moisturizer and headed over to the Ben Slimane hammam, which is just around the corner from our house. One of my favorite smells on the route to and from our house is the clean, soapy smell that emanates from the hammam, along with that of the burning wood used to heat its chambers. Most days, there’s a wagon mounded with wood chips parked at its door, its mule lazily chomping on a pile of greens.
Upon entering, we paid 8 dirhams apiece and were ushered into a changing room, where we stripped to our skivvies and then modestly tied oversized white bath towels around our bodies before dropping off our bags at the “coat check” (another 20 dirhams). Modesty didn’t last long. No sooner had we entered the first steam room, where we’d been led by a rotund headscarved woman of indeterminate middle age, than she grabbed our towels and unfurled us like two reluctant flags. A small naked boy of about five looked up at us in horror. “Where have these two white aliens descended from, and mummy make them disappear,” his look said.
It’s worth noting that the temperature outside (and inside our indoor-outdoor house) is in the low 60s these days, and the nights are downright freezing. Amanda has gamely doubled up her socks and donned a djellabah – this is a girl with significant NOLS experience, e.g., she knows how to stave off hypothermia – but even so, we were both looking forward to the warmth of the hammam. Within minutes of entering the first steamy room, our body temperature had gone up at least 10 degrees, and we weren’t sure if the heat or the embarrassment had turned our skin Marrakech red.
“It’s kinda like learning how to take a bath again, isn’t it?” Amanda asked as the various hammam staffers and clients directed us to fill our buckets from the scalding tap, cop a squat on our yoga mat, and then slather our now perspiring bodies with gooey black soap. An eighteen-year-old girl with perfect skin and perky breasts of the sort that inspire both envy and nostalgia cozied up to us and offered to help with the gommage, or luffahing, that follows the black soap application. At this point, we were both sitting cross-legged on the mat in a room with about 20 other woman of all shapes and ages in various stages of bath. Steam rose from the tile floor and from the buckets of water littered about the room. For the first time in Morocco, we felt part of a community of women and instead of averting their eyes and shrinking away from us as most do on the streets, they adopted us, admittedly like two curiosities, into their inner sanctum. Stripped down to our undies, maybe we’re all just girls who relish a break from the constraints of the outside world and the chance to chat and laugh without inhibition.
After Amanda and I had done what we thought was a thorough sluffing, we started in on the shampoo, only to have a very large, doughy woman with the most enormous pillowy breasts I’ve ever seen – terrifying, to be frank – wag her finger at us and insist on continuing the gommage that we’d, in her mind, not properly finished. Furious debate over the price of said services ensued between the marshmellowy woman and our nubile friend, who was incensed about the apparent attempt to gauge the newbies. I wanted to call off the negotiations, mostly because the verbal battle seemed so incongruous in this world of steamy relaxation, but to be honest, I was so over heated I could hardly think. Up first, I succumbed to her rough ministerings. Did I mention that she was fully naked, by the way? We thought the underwear rule was sacrosanct! First she grabbed my arm, driving my hand into her tummy-breast rolls, and began raking the gommage glove down my inner arm, pausing every now and then to show me the vast quantities of skin she’d removed. Not sure whether to be further embarrassed at the condition of my skin, or impressed with her work, I responded with a simple, “oh la, la,” which seemed to please her. Next, she flipped me onto my back and I found my head resting on her inner thigh as she worked away on my stomach and sides. This, I felt, is the crucial test: fight or flight . . . or just succumb. I opted to embrace the ludicrous scenario, imagining myself melting into the soap-scented vapors, and grateful that I’d been first to go “under the glove.” “Poor Amanda,” I thought, who’d watched the proceedings in silent dismay, “you’re up next!” Her efforts at distracting our glove-wielding tormentor by scurrying to and from the tap, filling every water bucket in sight with boiling water, failed, and soon she was splayed out on the steaming tiles with the woman’s knee on her sternum. Needless to say, the No Cameras Allowed policy was a real bummer, but something tells me this experience will remained burned into our mind’s eye.
You know the story about the frog, who, when put in a pot of tepid water that is then heated to boiling, will remain in the pot unable to move until he has been poached? Well, somewhere between the last scrape of the gommage glove and the dousing with a bucket of hot water that followed, Amanda’s and my eyes locked and we knew it was time to get out of the steam room or we risked boiling ourselves. We rushed to the outer changing room, where it was an easy 40 degrees cooler and lay back against the benches, huffing and puffing as if we’d just run a 10K. A number of the women who moments earlier were laughing with us in the baths, were now getting dressed and reaffixing headscarves, their body language indicating that we’d re-crossed the line and our old roles resumed.
posted by The Dowe-Sandes at
6:39 AM
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