WestonHankins.com

It’s not just the hot relaxing water, the massage and the handling… I’m now the cleanest I’ve been for the past 4 months and one step closer to becoming a Turk

For 30 Liras I got the full package, including the bone crunching which I could have done without.

We, a local and an Italian couple, came into Çinili Hamam. The guys on one side and the girl apart of course. The men there gave us some towels and pointed us to some changing rooms. It was a big hall with a fountain in the middle and the changing rooms all went from the balcony that looked above the fountain. I went into my changing room and closed the door behind me. The door was glas, the window was big. Hmmm I thought. I opened the door. I closed the door. Why did I have a door? Anyway…

I slipped out of everything I was wearing and wrapped a towel around my waste and headed downstairs. We were led into a room with separated sections to wash and some Turkish toilets in the far corner. I had to do the whole program so I started by squatting on one of them for a while. Then I joined the guys in the steam room.

There are many pools and some walls all around a big central stone table. We sat in a compartment, chatted and soaked our bodies with hot water from the pools. The air was thick and hot, very hot. After enough soaking time some older fat men came in and started telling me what to do. When we passed the point of “I don’t have the &#*% clue of what you’re telling me” communication became effective. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into a room, pushed me down on the floor to a sitting position, pulled my head by the hair forward and started scrubbing me with some sort of gloove… all this gently, yea, right. I enjoyed the scrubbing. First the back, the neck, the arms, the back again, the legs and all over again a couple times. From there he splashed some cooler water on me and removed some of the soap and took me back to the hot room. I lay on the stone in the center and he started a tough and extremely relaxing massage on all of my body (except for my butt and private parts). This lasted a while. It was awesome! Then we went back to the soapy place and he soaped me up some more and gave me the most violent hair/face/whatever’s-next-to-it wash ever. I rinsed up after this and went out to the fountain room to enjoy a sweet local soda while a guy wrapped a towel on my head.

Would I recommend it? Definitively. It’s awesome!

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