My Travel Bum Blog: 2009-2010: Skin (Cordoba)

Caroline taught me well. She sure did. So well that I almost didn’t bring my bathing suit with me at all on this trip. Why bother?, I thought. I had carried that thing around with me for 4-1/2 months last time and never used it. Not once. Well, I might have used half of it once.

That wasn’t always entirely comfortable for me. The spa in Slovakia was co-ed, and some of those Russian guys were pretty big. Not that kind of big… big as in fat. Chunky. Walls of blubber so vast that I wouldn’t have been able to tell whether they were that kind of big or not, even if I had wanted to. Veritable citadels of flesh obscuring anything that might lurk beneath. They came and went in the mist, and occasionally one climbed gracelessly into the hot tub with me. When in Rome…

My first ever experience with the concept of a nude, co-ed spa was when I was about 20. It was 1984, before the Wall came down and any country with even a remote connection to the Soviet Union was cloaked in mystery. I had overnighted in Vienna en route to an Italian convent that had been converted into a hostel. This was supposed to be a cheap travel summer.

Walking down the Kartnerstrasse, killing time until my sleeper to Tuscany pulled into the train station, I saw a sign that enticed me to change my plans completely. “Come to Budapest,” it said. Budapest? Well, why not? That sounded a lot more interesting than Italy. I’d already been to Italy.

Nobody spoke English in Budapest in 1984. Really. Even in my 4-star hotel, any time I needed to communicate they had to search out the one guy on staff who spoke even a few words. Forget about sentences… articles, prepositions… all luxuries in those days. I had to satisfy myself with more simple, generally monosyllabic constructions, like “room” and “key,” all with the appropriate items indicated on a map or with a pointed finger.

It was no wonder, then, that there was some confusion about the spa. I know I said this was supposed to be a cheap travel summer, but Eastern Europe was known for its spas… massages, saunas, therapeutic hot springs… while I was there I had to try them, right? Anyway, overall it was much cheaper to travel in Hungary than anywhere in Western Europe. So I rationalized.

Anyway, I made my way down to the spa just fine following signs with pictures. When I got there, the attendant motioned for me to take off my clothes, wrap up in a towel and warm up in the steam room before my massage. She pointed to a door. OK, I thought, that must be the women’s steam room.

I laid out on the hot stone slab and relaxed into the aromatic steam. Deep breaths of pine and eucalyptus. Relaxing, thinking how wonderful it was to be in Budapest. I was 20 remember, maybe 21. A naïve girl from California. This may have been the first time in my life I’d had any kind of a spa treatment at all… I had little or nothing to compare it to.

The door opened and through the mist in walked a Japanese man. I will never forget him. He looked to me like he could have been a sumo wrestler. He plopped himself down directly across from me, buck naked, spread his feet out wide and comfortable, leaned back against the hot wall and stared at me. A nice, friendly smile.

What was I supposed to do? I was from the United States, land of the prudes. I had heard of nude beaches. Nude saunas, yes, those too… but only in San Francisco. I wasn’t even old enough to drink and here they’d thrown a naked sumo wrestler into the steam room with me. Was I really in the right place?

I had no idea. And he was still staring at me.

Fortunately, it was almost time for my massage. I didn’t want to be rude, after all. I excused myself and waited the rest of the time outside, traumatized.

In retrospect, of course, this was perfectly normal. Nobody wears bathing suits at spas in Eastern Europe, or in Germany or France or Austria… They don’t have a problem with nudity. In fact, if you do appear in your bathing suit, they laugh at you. If you want to get attention, wear a bathing suit and everyone will stare at you and wonder what prudish, uptight land you come from.

So I almost didn’t even bother bringing my bathing suit with me on this trip to Spain and Portugal. In an Islamic country, things might be different, but the Arab baths in Cordoba aren’t really Arab anymore… now they’re just the sight of a wonderful spa that caters to Spanish and foreign tourists. It’s like going to Calistoga, except that the hot pools are made of solid marble and granite, openings in the ceiling – small circles and 8-pointed stars – allow light to shine in, candles glimmer in the mist, and the massage tables are arranged around the main pool, all out in the open. If you’re thirsty, you hop out and have a cup of sweet peppermint tea, then go back to alternating through the pools – hot, warm and cold.

I felt stupid bringing my bathing suit to this place. I’ll leave it in the locker, I thought, but I’ll have it with me… just in case. I wrap up in my big spa towel and walk into the dark, misty main pool room. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust but… what’s that I see… no large mounds of Russian flesh. No sumo wrestlers languishing on the sidelines. No… here I see fit people, slim people, and every single one of them is clothed. Except for me.

Damn!

Back into the locker room I go, grateful that I’d had the puritanical presence of mind to pack a bathing suit after all. And after a total of 5 months of traveling in 2009, I finally, actually got a chance to use it.