Turkish delight
I once heard that Madonna was building a hamam in her home. You always hear about Madonna doing bizarre things like chewing her food a hundred times or hating hydrangeas, so I didn’t realize Queen Madge was part of a reawakened retro-hip movement bringing the hamams back in style. I’ll spare you the wiki summary of what a hamam is and instead allow you to let your mind wander. What could the Crusaders have loved so much in a foreign land they sought to destroy that they would bottle it up and take the concept to continental Europe? If you think Turkish Delight is a sweet little thing served on a plate, I must insist that you’re wrong. The real Turkish delight is in the most seemingly mundane of all things: a bath.
Just coming off a six-hour hike that had left me brutalized, dusty and questioning my own sanity, the spa was the sole beacon of light. I remember fantasizing about this impending hamam experience while spearing my hiking sticks into loose rocks and dusty trails on a perilous descent from the Karwendel mountain range. Soaring just above the Bavarian postcard-perfect Mittenwald, the boyfriend’s family (ages ranging from two to 62) barely even considered this a day hike. For them, it was a walk in the park. This Filipina barely walks outside on pavement. I was sorely out of my element and trying very hard to prove my mettle.
The spa, however, was my domain. The spa was where I belonged after years of growing up with hilot, cutting high school extracurriculars for Thai foot massages and my quarterly sanity sojourns at The Farm at San Benito to say the least. But the word “hamam” conjured such breathlessly exotic visions of cool marble, spigots of hot water, and fuzzy fantasies of not much else. That’s where my idea of the Turkish Bath ended. I knew so little of the wonder I was about to discover for myself. How could I be so completely unaware of what was to be the most sacred spa experiences of my life? This was my Columbus moment. My Vespucci dream. Here I was, my own Marco Polo, because baths will never be the same again.
There are no other people at Schloss Elmau’s 500-square-meter hamam. All three large dome rooms, with hot stones, water tubs and steam baths, are wholly ours. A tall, blonde, and very German woman in a one-piece Speedo and a towel around her waist enters chattily with a Turkish-looking man with a similarly wrapped towel. My scrubber natir introduces herself and I’m shown an almost-gingham printed peshtemal to wrap myself with. We are guided to begin the journey by raising our body temperatures in a potentially semi-public steam room. I am glad to see it is empty when the natir runs the faucet as warm water gushes and overflows a huge brass sink. We are given shallow metal bowls with which to collect and pour water on ourselves as the temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius and the boyfriend begins to extol the wonders of the sauna. As an Asian with a general aversion to nudity and a case of troubling eczema since childhood, I am skeptical of how raising the body temperature is supposed to be as amazing for detoxifying your skin (and other organs) as it is for your heart and immune system. I let it sit for a while, but soon I am poking my head out of the room and gasping for air.
The natir and tellak (male scrubber) fetch us from the steam room and we are hosed down with cold water: a welcome respite from the heat and I hear it is amazing for your skin. Next, we’re off to the treatment room with a mammoth-sized slab of cool Bavarian marble bigger than my entire bathroom in New York last summer in the center of a vast chamber. Spigots are running vigorously as the loud sound of running water echoes throughout the huge marble hexagonal room and it might be the heat, but I feel a rush of excitement in this entirely foreign experience. Lying facedown on the slick marble, my peshtemal is adjusted for comfort and modesty and she begins the washing and scrubbing.
The alternate motions of wash, scrub, wash, scrub are so relaxing it almost lulls me to sleep. There’s nothing like being bathed by another person and this is officially one of most luxurious moments of my life. In almost loving, but strangely brisk movements, swaths of water wash over me before the scrubbing commences and produces bubbles that envelop me in a soft cocoon. It’s like being hugged by unicorns in an almost unbearable lightness that bubble baths could never begin to achieve.
Just as I think it can’t get any better than this, I am floored by the strangest sensation I have ever felt in my life. Nothing you will ever do — no hedonistic pleasure, no drug, no great love — can prepare you for the moment when someone blows up a pillowcase-sized linen bag and runs it through a soapy mixture so that it feel like you are being massaged by silky smooth, velvet-soft bubbles. Are you still with me? At this point, we are at unbearably light silk-velvet bubbles giving you a full body massage as you are inside a warm cocoon of bubbles. Who even came up with this? I couldn’t even fathom what was happening at first; I had to look up and over my shoulder. I couldn’t compare the sensation to anything I’d known before. A bubbly inflated pillowcase: who knew? Soon, the pillowcase-bubble effect is over and mere hands follow up with a second full-body massage. The massage is still happening inside a bubble bath, though. I wonder to myself if massages or bubble baths will ever be the same. Will life even be the same?
Finally, the natir is washing my hair and commenting on how thick it is. They must not get many Asians at the schloss. All the while, my eyes are closed and I hear the bellowing sound of water gushing forth from unseen valves. It makes everything feel so clean and new. It also sounds like they’ve washed the entire hamam in the process. I see now how cleanliness is indoctrinated into the Muslim concept of purity. It makes sense that hamams of bygone eras were first attached to mosques. I can feel the end of the treatment coming soon and I am overcome by a warm, fuzzy sense of wellbeing. After being shown to a private marble changing room, I am given towels to dry off in as I fold the peshtemal neatly on a marble counter. The blonde natir comes back in and wraps another towel around my shoulders and a smaller towel around my head. She produces a soft giggle and says “Arab style.” I know she is laughing because I am this small, weird Asian in a Turkish bath in a German Alpine spa resort now dressed like an Arab. Let’s be real.
Before I knew it, it was all over and I was situated in a large armchair as my limbs were sprayed and rubbed with a sort of alcohol before they were wrapped in warm towels. She wouldn’t let me move except to drink delicious Turkish apple tea she fixed alongside a silver plate of nuts, figs and sweet treats. I was not about to argue. The warm tea lounge allows your body to return to the normal temperature as you mull over how freaking extraordinary that experience was and wonder how you will ever live again without it. It might be time to start saving to train one of your maids to be a real hamam scrubber and install a slab of marble in your home. And a sauna. But I guess some people have that already.
When I entered the hamam, it was with a veil of cool over my trepidation. Seconds before we headed inside, the boyfriend admitted that there would be some nakedness involved. I immediately objected. How naked? Would all four of us be naked? Am I suppose to pretend that nudity is totally okay and I’m completely acclimated to this Euro spa situation where everyone is expected to be naked with two male geriatrics and their boyfriend’s brother-in-law in the same sauna? But we all have breakfast together!
And I realized that this is probably why I didn’t visit the Hagia Sophia hamam when I was in Istanbul several years ago. My mother didn’t seem so hot on the idea and we both shrugged off what we thought was a needlessly sweaty and humid experience for an afternoon strolling Nisantasi. Sadly, my inherited Puritanical nature (thank you, American neocolonialism) and plain old ignorance put off this divine experience for another six years. Isn’t it strange that Manila has zero hamams despite embracing just about every other major spa tradition in the world? Nobody even really gets naked in saunas. We have all kinds of spa and wellness services that go from seedy massage to nifty home spa services that will package a two-hour massage with a blow dry and mani-pedi. Never mind the full-blown wellness getaways at one of The Farm’s sublime Narra Villas. Why don’t we have any hamams? Are they simply too foreign? Is it, dare I say it, too Muslim? Because I’m completely willing to invest in one. And if anyone wants to join this venture, this is an open call.
