I tried to take a picture of the bathhouse but the second I took out my camera the lens fogged right up! I'll try again another day. Story after the jump...
The bathhouse is one of my favorite things about this town. Everyone in town uses it, and a lot of the houses here don’t even have baths or showers in them. It’s open all the time, with separate hours for men and women. Nothing beats the endless hot water (107 degrees!) and a steamy room on a cold, wet day. (That’s been every day, so far.) There’s a deep tub with a ledge for sitting on carved into the ground. Hot water bubbles up from the bottom and spills over the edges, pouring out through a drain in the wall. All around, there are containers for scooping out water that you can use to clean yourself before you get in.
It’s the nakedest place I’ve ever been. The first couple of times I used it, I was the only person in there. But yesterday when I went in it was pretty packed. A few minutes after I walked in, a woman came out of the tub area and sat down on a bench. She kind of sighed, I thought to express how good the hot water had felt. But then she did it again and again and slouched down. We couldn’t tell what was going on, but obviously something was wrong, so a couple of other women and I rushed over. It turned out that, most likely, she had passed out from the heat. Between the three of us we managed to get her lying down with a towel under her head so she could breathe better. But it wasn’t easy. So I found myself in awfully close physical contact with three women I’d never seen before— even now, I don’t know if I would recognize them if I saw them again—none of us with clothes on. And everyone was completely unfazed, except me, a little bit, which I suppose is entirely natural considering that they’ve been hanging out with each other naked every day for who knows how long. It was really cool. The woman was fine, by the way. After we let in some cool air she recovered in a couple of minutes. Does having a public bathhouse produce a community of people who are amazingly accepting of their own (and everybody else’s) bodies?
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