sons of Abrahammam

sure, it was $25 that I didn’t have to spare. but it had to be done. missing an hour in the historic Çemberlitaş Hamam in Istanbul is like not throwing up on your birthday – it just doesn’t happen. and so I went. with my $25 [read: daily budget] and I paid, taking note that the free postcards on my right were going to soon have a dent and perhaps a change of sign. holding my little scrubcloth and a yellow plastic piece that said ‘massage’, I was handed a sarong and told to go up to the 3rd floor to change. and so I did. into a tiny little phonebooth of a room that would be all mine, should I care to come back up after the process and want to relax. at $25 I considered just crashing there for the night. down the stairs and into the staging area. I call it the ’staging area’ because I don’t happen to know what you’d call a room before the big room whose sole purpose is to change into a dry sarong once it’s all done – a ‘dry sarong room’? fine. a dry sarong room. ‘massage after’ said the mustached man with nice eyes, pulling back the second curtain. now, what you see pictured above is what it must look like when it’s closed, because when I walked in it was packed. not a bad packed, but plenty of people on that main center and in the alcoves. I squeezed into a corner and doused my sweat with cool water from the basin…

I should stop now and admit to have never written ‘alcove’ and ‘basin’ before.

anyway.

I went out into the middle and was given a decent scrub and massage by another man with a mustache and then told to ‘relax’ for a while. so I relaxed for a while. then I showered. then changed into a dry sarong in the dry sarong room. and then walked up the three flights of  stairs to my room. there were a handful of people up there in their little rooms. some of them out of their little rooms talking. others sitting in one corner watching television. a guy was stretching in another. and in the third corner was a guy on his phone. having 15 minutes to kill while waiting on my friend Adela to finish, I decided to stretch a little bit myself, as I’ve slept in 18 different beds in the past three weeks and was, needless to say, stiff. I walked over and put my towel down just like the guy next to me did. straightened my back. extended my arms. deeeeeeeep breath in and, bending over, deeeeeeeeep breath out. I was just about all the way down when I heard him say something. and then I turned my head to look.

it was about 40 seconds, the time it took me to walk quickly to my little room, throw my shoes on, bolt down the three flights of stairs, past the free juice bar and past the free postcard stand. across from the entrance was a little bus stop where I waited, with wet hair, on Adela to come out.

had I an internal compass, I could have told you which side of the street I was on.

I could have also told you that the ‘yoga corner’ up there on the 3rd floor was pointing south-east.

as was the man stretching.

towards Mecca.

…

…

we’ll just go ahead and call that $25 a penance tax.