Hammam: Pleasureful paradise or painful primping?

So I had my first authentic hammam experience with my friend Fatima and her sister Meryem. Hammam, for those who may not know, is similar to a Turkish bath in that men and women from the neighborhood gather together in a steamy bath house, scrubbing each other's backs, and gossiping about the days events. In Morocco, most hammams consists of a series of rooms increasing in heat and steaminess as you venture deeper into the hammam. Women enter the hammam, pay their 7 Dirhams ($1), and strip down to their underwear.

In my experience, upon entering the first room, I found women sitting on little stools, gathered around a bucket of water, brushing their teeth idly. We continued through two more rooms of women gathered around buckets of water and henna paste as they scrubbed each other with a coarse rag not much different from sandpaper. We entered the final room of the hammam where there was one large tub with scalding hot water and another with freezing spring water. We each got our bucket and mixed water from the two tubs until we got a temperature we were happy with. Fatima and Meryem laid out their plastic mats to sit on and began situating all their soaps, shampoos, foot scrubs, hairbrushes, and oils around them. As I went to join them, I got cornered by a large, burly woman who brusquely positioned me in a corner and began building a little barricade of water buckets around me. I pleadingly looked at Fatima and Meryem, who were happily scrubbing each other's backs, for rescue. Fatima just smiled and waved her hand as if to indicate, "just go with it!" So . . . I went with it.

The women, whose name I found out to be Amina, motioned me to sit on a little plastic mat she laid out for me. She sat down beside me, straddled her legs and thrust my head onto one of her large, muscular thighs. She gripped my wrists and flung them up over my head. Now, to envision this a little more precisely, it was as if I was a washboard (minus the six-pack stomach) and she was setting up to scrub her laundry down the length of my body. She proceeded to take the sand paper scrub and violently brush it down my forearm all the way to my hips. She did this repeatedly for about 10 minutes until she felt that removing seven layers of skin and seeing my raw flesh glow red was suffice.

It actually reminded me of the time I was in the Peace Corps and I got incredibly sick off of some fruit I ate from a tree. My host mom told me to get naked, made me lie face down on my bed, and gave me a full body rub down with vegetable oil. Sounds like it could be pleasant, but if you could see the size of my mom and her coarse, strong hands, you would understand why her pushing my pressure points with all her might and body weight behind it was a painful experience. Apart from that, that fact that I barely knew the woman and was lying in the bed naked, vulnerable, and ready to be slow roasted made the situation all the more awkward.

Hammam was a similar experience. After she had peeled me from the front, she grunted and literally flipped me over onto my stomach and began the process all over again. She would scrub diligently around my neck and shoulders and then sand my butt until I seriously thought I may be bleeding. I probably would not have permitted the torture to continue if it weren't for the millions of white noodle-like clumps of dead skin all over my body. It was disgusting and incredible all at the same time. And I felt like it had to be good for me, so I endured.

After I thought she had finished with me, she propped me up, grabbed my cheeks with her pudgy fingers, looked at me in the eyes and began cracking up. I think she saw the tears of pain welling up and thought it was humorous. She then took the "brill-o pad" and scrubbed my face so hard that I think she was trying to remove the mole on my right cheek. Thankfully, she was unsuccessful and gave up on the beauty mark after about five minutes. Finally, she slapped me on the back and quickly got up and moved on to her next victim.

I sat their, skin stinging, utterly confused at what just happened and what to do next, and a little angry at my two friends. Then Fatima came up with some green, slimy, henna paste and began to gently rub it all over my body. The cool slime felt so good. I let her cover my entire body as I gradually drifted off into partial unconsciousness, listening to the muffled sounds of women chatting in darija and children splashing in the water tubs. Ahhhhh, it was heavenly and my skin felt softer than anything I had ever felt before. I couldn't stop rubbing my shoulders and thighs.

After we rinsed off with the remaining water in our buckets, brushed our teeth and towel-dried in the outer room, we got into comfy clothes and headed to the hair salon. It was 9 PM on a Sunday night and the salon was packed with other women who had just gone to hammam, painting their nails, getting their hair died with henna, and dancing with the owner of the salon to an Algerian pop video playing on the small TV overhead. I got what little hair I have trimmed and Fatima and Meryem got their nails painted. We had a couple pots of tea at the salon and then went back to Meryem's house to go to bed. I fell asleep, still rubbing my smooth skin and thinking of Amina's painful, yet pleasureful, powers.