Fermez la douche!

Today we were back to the usual Swiss spring weather, with rain and cold and the occasional hearty gust of wind. Not very hospitable for city walking, though Bridget and I did get the train (which arrived at 2:15 on the nose... God I love this country) into the city for a little hammaming, Swiss-style.

A hammam is a public bath... sort of an offshoot of ancient Roman baths, and found, to my understanding, in Muslim countries. When I lived with a family in Morocco during my junior year, the hammam was a weekly event for my host mother and sisters, and with the expense of heating gas, became my only bath each week (well, when in Rome). The whole process involves rooms of three different temperatures and an elaborate set of bathing steps . Depending on your companions' neighborhood affiliations, you could find yourself in a hot steamy room for two hours. This lengthy bathing period, of course, allows you to cover yourself head-to-toe in henna mud, scrub your skin with a Brillo-like mitt, and eventually assist a neighbor in washing her back before you even get to the rather involved drying and lounging portion of the day. You may also witness screaming children being scrubbed with a brown, waxy soap, their mothers grim faces rosy with heat and framed by their gold necklaces pulled up onto their foreheads for safekeeping.

Here in Zuerich, however, the hammam is more like an amalgamation of the Turkish bath (a big, cool pool in one of the rooms is not something I saw in any Moroccan bath) and a spa.

First major difference: you can go about barefoot and completely confident (God I love this country... there's a antiseptic spray stationed outside the door!). The equipment is provided as well, which is nice. You're given a copper bowl that you use to get water from the beautiful copper cisterns, and a clean scrubby mitt, as well as tablecloth-like sheet (as the rules say "the hammam is a no-naked zone") and terry robe.

The whole place is as much about form as function. There's beautiful Moroccan-style tiles on the walls, there's a smell of eucalyptus and rose petals in the steam.

This was Bridget's maiden voyage into public bathing, and we were given an English-language version of the house rules, which hadn't existed upon my last visit. Among the best: "no changing of intimacy, such as kissing or huging in the hammam" (sic). As this hammam is coed, I imagine they're trying to keep the place from degenerating into some kind of crazed exfoliating orgy, which I appreciate.

Yes, coed public bathing. In and of itself, not a bad thing, but it takes some getting used to. Swiss men of all ages, some attractive and many not, sallying about wrapped in tablecloth-like sheets. Luckily, there's a section of the bath for Frauen only, so we did our scrubbing in relative privacy.

They also provide a lovely argan oil soap, which prevents sensitive-skinned types like we Mohans from leaving the place looking like a couple of dried-up husks.

The whole experience at the Swiss hammam is capped by a large lounging area, where you are given water and mint tea. It was all we could do not to settle down for a nice nap, after getting close to light-headed in the steam.

A lovely way to spend a rainy day, and a pretty solid use for 38 CHF.

I don't know why there aren't any proper hammams in New York. Don't we have everything in New York? In lieu of going back to Morocco, I'll probably pop into those Russian & Turkish Baths one of these days and see if getting whipped by oily oak leaves is a sufficient compromise.