Washing Away the Memories

Saturday afternoon in Meknes, ISA offered us the option to have a truly awkward cultural experience: go to the Turkish baths. After some reluctance, all of the girls succumbed to peer pressure and decided to go. Donning our bathing suits, we went to the baths, which we all envisioned to be right out of the Roman tradition, or similar to the Arab baths a few girls had already ventured to Granada.

We severely underestimated the sketchiness.

There were not baths with wide, glistening pools, in which we could bask for unlimited amounts of time. No, these ¨baths¨ instead resembled the worse high school girls locker room showers you can envision, filth and all. We walked into a dark chamber, where two pipes, painted blue and red, lined the walls. They then handed us a bucket and some soap, and basically said “enjoy!”. We then had the wonderful opportunity to fill our bucket with water of our favorite temperature, dump it on ourselves, lather up in soap, and then dump water on ourselves again.

Our program director had also explained that we would have the opportunity for massages as well. Arriving, we discovered that these massages were actually intensive scrubbings – a huge Moroccan woman took a loofa sponge which felt more like steel wool, and then spent ten minutes mercilessly scraping all of the dead skin off of our entire bodies. In happy news, my skin is really soft now!

There were lots of Moroccan woman in these same baths as well...all of them wearing nothing. After about 10 minutes of utter confusion and unease, most of the 8 girls in my group decided to make the most of our rather odd experience by starting water fights, with the more daring ones joining the Moroccans in their more traditional bathing attire. (or lack thereof)

(I will refrain from telling you at this point the extent of my own personal awkward cultural courage.)