The above picture (of our new trivet), should give you a great idea of my day yesterday...

I met up with Rob and Lauren, my friends who are traveling around the world this year, and their Turkish friend Tefik, to go to this hamam. I was a little nervous (Chris' cautionary tale of his friend who actually "bled" from the scrubbing had it's desired effect) but excited for what I hoped would be a day of pampering. What we ended up with was very interesting....

When we paid at the door, we each got a little scrubbing mitt and a few things that look like rectangular poker chips, each one designating a service we'd paid for (scrub, massage and clay mask for me). We split up (men in one part of the hamam and women in the other) and we went into the locker room to change into a very thin towel/sheet type thing. We then went into the heating room - a large, all marble, room, with a raised marble slab taking over the middle of the room. Unsure of what to do next, lauren and I approaced two of the low sinks with copper bowls floating in them around the edges of the room, and started to rinse off with the hot water. We then followed suit of the other people in the room, and lay on the big marble slab in the middle of the room. Suddenly, a woman with the largest, untethered breasts i have ever seen, wearing nothing but underwear walks in. She points at me and waves me over to her. Hmm, I think. This is the woman who's going to give me my scrubdown? Yes, it was. And you get absolutely, truly bathed. It was really relaxing, and cool to see scores of skin falling off of your body, but slightly less cool when she was grabbing and scrubbing my arm and it kept bumping into her ... stuff. Anyway, after the scrub, she had a bucket of incredibly sudsy soap bubbles and cleaned me with that. Then, to really bring you back to age 3, i was taken into another room, where she washed. my. hair! After all of that was done, I was led back out into a sort of waiting room, for the 'hot oil massage' - This ended up being fantastic and done by a woman who was actually clothed! All in all, a great day, but definitely something you couldn't find in the states. Well, at least something I wouldn't have found in the states!