Turkish bath...Not Turkish Delight

Hello All! So I finally found a second to sit down and update everybody on life. Sorry it has been so long but between traveling, lectures and sightseeing life has been a little hectic on this side of the pond. We made it to Istanbul safely and checked into our amazing hostel in the Mosque district, appropriately named Istanbul Hostel. I would highly recommend that if you are in this part of the world you stay here. It is clean and safe and the staff was the most amazing and helpful people you could ever meet. The hostel is situated about a 2 min walk from the square that holds both the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. For those of you who have no idea what these buildings are I would suggest you go and look up some stuff right now. They are the most beautiful examples of Ottoman architecture I have ever seen in my life and the history behind both buildings is wonderful. I would account it for you but I don’t have the time and quite frankly I don’t think you have the patience.

We decided on the bus that it might be a good idea to relax and find something nice to do in the evening once we arrived and since the mosques and bazaars were being given whole days to do later we thought a nice traditional Turkish bath might be kind of cool. Oh boy. The hostel has a really awesome deal with a local traditional bath where you pay 45 TL and you get the whole package deal. So we went for that and grabbed a cab into what must have been one of the more sketchy parts of the area. Upon arriving an older Turkish woman who spoke very little english ushered the girls down a cement staircase in a back alley and into a large room with smaller rooms/ lockers coming off of it. Each of us were shown into a locker, given a towel and a pair of bath shoes and told to strip. (Yeah it keeps getting better after this so only the brave should venture on reading.) After this all of us emerge from the lockers and into the larger room (where there are a couple of Turkish women chilling on couches and pillows as well as some Germans (?)) clutching our towels like there are our last hold on life. The old Turkish lady motions that we should follow her and we go into this tiny little corridor that leads into a sauna. This room then connects to a larger room made of marble with very high ceilings and a very large slab of rock in the middle.

We are greeted by yet another old Turkish lady, accept this time she is very large, very saggy and very much naked (accept for her bathing suit bottoms…which were very small.) Around the edge of the sauna runs a big built in bench thing and this then has little basins with faucets on every wall. Each of us are shown to a basin and told to use the bowls to pour hot water over ourselves. It is also at this point that that old Turkish woman, who doesn’t speak any english, and is large and naked, snatches our much loved towels away from us…oh goodness. We chill in the big sauna room for a bit before the lady comes back and motions to me that I should lay out on the big slab of rock. I do so and she puts on this big mitten thingy, at this point I am just hoping to get out of there with all ten fingers and all ten toes. She uses the mitten to scrub off every piece of dead skin on my entire body and I cry a little bit as the tan I had kind of been accumulating goes along with it. Then she leads me back to my basin and motions for me to continue washing. So all of us get the Turkish scrub down and a different lady comes in and again motions for me to lay down. This part was the best. She takes a giant luffa and suds you up and then gives you a body massage. There was a little more to the spa thing but I think you have heard enough at this point and there are other adventures to relay

I have to go to a tour of campus now, but for anyone who is reading this currently, I will finish the post when I get back!

~Claire