The Kuşadasi Car Wash

(No pictures for this report-- you'll read why below.)

So here’s the drill. They have a hammam (Turkish bath) here, on site; it’s part of the one-price-for-all strategy.

So this PM, after lunch, we went.

There’s about 15 minutes of sauna, to loosen you up, then you go to a warm room with what looks like a marble drum in the center.

The room is about 20 feet across and has a built-in marble seat around the inside circumference of the walls, and this marble drum is about 8 by 8 feet or so in the middle.

You lie on the (it’s very warm, heated from inside by hot water) marble drum and they start by sluicing just-hot-enough water all over you.

The next part was like going through a Brillo car wash--- the use some kind of mitt with a rough surface, not unlike those white cotton garden gloves with all the little gripping dots on them, and there’s no way you can escape. . . .

They’ve got you good.

All I could think of was David yelling: “Dad, dad—roll up the windows— we’re in a car wash!”

So they get you on the back, then roll you over and they get your front.

Then they turn on the bubble machine—not unlike in I Love Lucy or Mr. Roberts when the laundry exploded and there were suds everywhere, they pour suds on you from some giant suds machine.

Then you get scrubbed with bar soap and get turned back over and they do your back side; suds again, then sluicing and more sluicing, and then they lead you out where you get apple tea and a pesto and seaweed facial.

I looked like an avocado.

They said my skin would feel like a baby’s butt, but it looks like a baby’s butt (and I’m not saying a baby what) so I think I got cheated, except it was all free and I just went for it.

No cameras, though. . . . not on your life.

I was done at that point, but Kim went for the whole enchilada--- abrading, defiling, pillaging, being dragged by oxen through gravel . . . . I’m not sure what all else, except it cost extra and I haven’t heard her next door yet.

The best part was when this kid who was doing all the pulling, massaging, pummeling, etc. of my carcass told me I had arms like spaghetti, and I told him I was a former Turkish wrestling champion.