And Speaking of Community . . .

There was a story in the New York Times travel section, in their special Hotel and Spa issue, about how offering wi-fi is popping up in spas, a practice designed for the spa goer who is ostensibly there to relax but is unable to if he or she cannot stay connected. This is just so weird to me. The reason I’d like to see the practice banished before it gets out of control is the cell phone.


Though the article clearly states that cell phones are still verboten in the spa environment, I liken allowing people to plug in while in the spa to cell phone use in public, which is hands down out of control. Ha! I think I just made a pun.

People noodling on their gadgets, whether it’s blackberries, lap tops or cell phones, are not engaged in their environment, they are inward focused, not participating, present members of a community. This can further create rude behavior and missteps—even if it’s unintentional—not to mention, in the case of cell phones, serious accidents. You’ve seen them on streets, on trains, or worst of all in cars, users so immersed in conversation that they lose all sense of boundaries and treat public space like it’s their personal living room. Or bedroom. (Yuck.)

If being plugged in proliferates as a practice in spas, it will not only cramp others’ relaxation, but in a sense it will be catering to the lowest common denominator—something that politicians do brilliantly. So let’s keep politics out of the spa environment and we’ll all be better people for it.

More on Bathhouses

The commenter of my Hot Springs post prompted today’s post. She compares those bathhouses to hammams, which she rightly notes are now being offered on modern spa menus.

According to some of the reading I’ve done, hammams originated in northern Africa and date back to the 1500s. Though modeled on the old European and Middle Eastern traditions, the similarities between the Hot Springs bathhouses in Arkansas versus those ancient practices around the world, seems to center on intent: health versus relaxation. Which, by the way, regarding the spa experience, Americans today still seem on the fence about whether it should be one or the other. It’s a conundrum because the vast majority of treatments on modern spa menus derive almost exclusively from ancient practices, which have therapeutic value.

Oddly, in the case of bathhouses versus hammams, things are flipped. Hammams are and were a social hub, communal places to go to relax and hang out with friends and make friends with strangers, as you took your ablutions, steamed, purified and replenished your body and capped the experience with a massage. This was the therapy as relaxation and a great way to start or end any day, not to mention as a midday booster.

Not so in the case in the bathhouses, such as the one I visited in Hot Springs. Those existed to provide therapeutic relief for sick people. They called it “the water cure” your visit was solely intended to improve, or hopefully vanquish, your existing diseases, by giving in to the 4,000 year-old thermal waters believed to have properties. The environment of the bathhouse was clinical, stark and very very serious. In many cases I’m sure people benefited greatly. But these places were the haunts for the likes of the health crusader John Harvey Kellogg of Corn Flakes
cereal fame. It’s said he was a great surgeon, but for every good idea he had (vegetarianism, inventing the electric blanket) he had his share of bad ones (the female orgasm was abnormal but nothing a good hit of carbolic acid couldn’t rectify).

Though a couple of old Turkish baths have recently reopened in Chicago, I haven't gathered my flip flops and taken the plunge. The closest I’ve come to a hammam in the Midwest is actually a Korean bathhouse called Paradise. It’s a blast, a real scene and strongholf for the Asian community in Chicago's Albany Park. But you can't be faint of heart if you want to hold your own to the Korean women who frequent the place; they take their relaxation seriously so it’s not for the squeamish. But the prices can’t be beat—$20, massages are extra.

In fact, now that I think about it, I may have visited Paradise with the commenter who prompted this post, and who, by the way, happens to be my friend.

I’d love to hear more comments about other hydrotherapies you have known and loved so don’t be a stranger.

The photo, top left, comes courtesy of cyberbohemia.com

Last train to Hot Springs

When I was 19 my sister and I took a side trip around the island of Sicily during a two-month family stay in my mom’s home town of Sant’ Ambrogio on Sicily’s northern coast, just an hour or so from Palermo. Sant’ Ambrogio has a population of about 200 but a mere seven kilometer drive will land you in Cefalù, which has become wildly popular since those visits of my youth. It was already well on its way to being a vacation hotspot—I recall it swarming with mostly German tourists—but now I wouldn’t consider going there in July and August, which were our usual vacation months.

That summer we took a train around the periphery of the island, stopping to stay where the spirit moved us. I don’t remember how it happened—I think we just followed the crowds—but one day we found ourselves hopping a ferry headed for Lipari, one of what is usually referred to as the Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Some of us went for the scenery and to have a new experience, but the older people were looking to bask in the healing mud baths, the source of which was the volcanic pumice quarry.

As soon as we debarked, people began peeling off their clothes and wading into the chalky waters. It didn’t take much before my sister and I started slathering ourselves with mud. Oh, if I could only upload those photos! But it was long before the digital age. Each time we’d look at each other we’d guffaw and slather some more. The whole place smelled of matchsticks and for a solid week, no matter how many times we washed ourselves, as soon as our skin dried it turned the same pale white of the mud.

That was my first experience with man’s rush to yield to nature’s healing properties, even though I was thankfully free of desperation because at 19 nothing much ever hurts.

So last week I decided to spend a few days at the (relatively) nearby hot springs in Arkansas, to check out the old bathhouses on the strip located right across the street from Hot Springs National Park called Bathhouse Row. Most of those old bathhouses are closed down now, though not for long since they've been cleaned up. One is still operational; the Buckstaff, has been running steadily since 1912. I tried to get in for an old-time bathing experience but the lines were long and their hours are short.


So I went to one of the many others instead, the old Arlington Hotel bathhouse. Let’s just say it’s seen better days. Not much of an effort has been made to spiff up the place (unlike the Buckstaff, which has all the charm of an old bathhouse but none of the creeping inevitabilities that a facility regularly hitting steamy temps in excess of 100 degrees would have. I got dunked, scrubbed, wrapped and patted down just like the ladies before me did as long as 140 years ago. The rooms were clinical and stark and no creature-comfort efforts were made.

There are over 100 hot springs in the US alone, mostly on the coasts, and if you’ve never been I encourage you to visit one, just to see what counted as medicine to our forebears. It’s sobering, for sure. But guess what? The bathhouses are experiencing a resurgence of interest as we march willingly back to the days of natural remedies for preventive and disease care.