I exchanged my clothing for a large bath sheet. I knew that so swathed, I could pass as splendidly through rooms of pools and saunas as an ocean liner from lock to lock in transit between oceans.
I had an experience while in Baden-Baden last month to tell you about. I stripped for a public bath on coed bathing day at the Friedrichsbad, the Roman-Irish bath built in 1870. I have known that as Rome the civilization was foundering in ancient days, virtuoso feats of plumbing were accomplished throughout the sad remains of empire. I have wanted to experience such a fine bath for myself, with the amenities of 1870s modernity, so I chose the Friedrichsbad, built on an ancient Roman site. There are other thermal baths in this spa city, but my friends told me that the traditional one, the all-nude Friedrichsbad, provides the finest experience.
I went by myself. Too personal, my husband said, and he stayed back at our Atlantic Park Hotel in the wood- paneled library, reading his Kindle in front of the fire. He had a long afternoon to himself to look forward to, while I was cleaning up. I bought my ticket to the bath a few days before. Would I need a robe? A towel? The concierge assured me that the Friedrichsbad would provide everything, and so off I went that early afternoon through beautiful old Baden-Baden to a palace of wellbeing and relaxation.
The man who met me at the front desk handed me a wrist band embedded with a chip that would permit me to enter the dressing rooms and from there commence my four-hour journey through 17 stages of imperial cleanliness including soap and brush massage, and a cream massage not to be missed. I went up the grand staircase that is as beautiful as the sweeping stairs of the ballroom of the Titanic. In the locker room, I exchanged my clothing for a large bath sheet. I knew that so swathed, I could pass as splendidly through rooms of pools and saunas as an ocean liner from lock to lock in transit between oceans. A bath sheet is a fine garment, knotted just so.
In the first shower room, a vast room lined with shower heads, there a few people there before me, each to a shower, cleaning up. This was my first shower in a room with strangers, but face to the wall, and soaked in streaming water I knew my bath sheet was just an arm’s length away. Until it wasn’t. I opened my eyes as an attendant walked away with it. I made the long walk across the room into a drying room of very warm air.
The drying room was less private than I hoped. It was cavernous, and dimly lighted—as it needed to be, because lined up across the room were about 20 teak benches, and all but two were occupied, and all the occupants were men. If you look this up on the Internet, you will find photos of this room, and men and women are covered by towels. Do not be fooled. There are no towels. There are no towels for the next four hours. There were only men in this room now, all flat on their backs. Which of the two free benches to choose? Which narrow aisle to walk down to get there? There were also two empty chairs in front, and I claimed one and sat down.
On the walls of each room there is small sign that indicates how long you should remain in the room, although you may leave sooner. In this drying and warming room, the recommendation was 20 minutes. Some men left, and other men entered and took their places, flat on their backs on the benches. The minutes ticked away as I memorized the wall tiles, which are exquisite.
The tiles on the walls were installed when the Friedrichsbad was built 140 years ago. Scenes of water and pond life are depicted in soothing greens and blues. Small aquatic animals peek through water reeds and ferns, and they have been undisturbed for 140 years in their kingdoms on the wall. I wanted to remain, as unmoving as they, but after 30 minutes, I really had to get up and walk in front of all those fellows to get to the archway at the far end of the room.
I entered a sauna, the first of several. I will describe only the first. Again, I entered a world of men. Towels? An attendant at the archway handed me a tiny sit-upon towel. The sauna was frankly intimate. Rows of benches in tiers climbed up in the center of the steamy room. All the recumbent men of the room before were huddled now together (the room was small) on benches built in three tiers in the center of the room, like a wedding cake with naked men as decorations. I found a place against the wall. The room was steamy, and there were no tiles to admire, so I observed what I saw. I relaxed a little, and felt compassion for these many, many naked men. Here is a stock photo provided by the spa. While coed, I was with men only, the day long. They looked vulnerable sitting there in their bright pink skins and wearing their fine tummies. 
A few men quietly spoke now and then to a neighbor, but it was a silent experience, throughout. I myself looked like a rather damp, overheated and out-of-place fertility symbol pinned unmoving, spine straight to the wall. Eventually I too had to leave, and I exited as I must, in front of the grandstand through another archway into the first deep pool of spring-fed water.
The pool was very hot, and fed by water naturally mineral-salty, and clear. The salt water was chest-high on me; I was far more buoyant than ever I imagined. I laughed to myself, and I decided to turn and face the wall, and paddle around a bit at the far end of the pool. I wasn’t alone for long, because my fellow bathers were swimming lengths right by me.
On and on the afternoon went, and eventually I left a pool and entered a room where men in white uniforms were scrubbing--women. How was it that I was travelling with the pod of the business men’s association of Baden-Baden, well-toned for the most part, including the one I thought of as the Prussian general? I looked around the new room—women of all ages and a few men were lying on their backs or stomachs on pallets, and they were being scrubbed by brush by their attendants. One looked at me in surprise as I entered through the particular doorway into this pleasant haven. He checked my wristband and told me to go back the way I came and enter the scrubbing massage room for the coed-bathers. I gestured to the women and old men together in this room, but I was shooed out anyway. I had to find the other room, and to do that, I had to return to the hot bathing pool room I had just left.
The way from one stage to the next is not always clearly marked. Sometimes you must enter an archway and return to previous rooms before finding, in my case, room 5. The signs were small. The room was hot. My eye glasses, which I had placed on a shelf, had become so steamed that even rubbing them was useless. This was a low moment. What was I to do? Burst into tears and await rescue by naked men? Where was my Virgil in this particular purgatory? No. I was on my own, a plump American woman who upon arising from the buoyant bathing pool felt as if all the gravity of the world had settled down around her, and I walked slowly around the hot pool two times checking all the doorways before finally I found my way right.
I escaped into the scrubbing massage room. 
I was guided onto a towel-draped pallet, guided to lie on my back, and I was showered with warm water. The attendant, a handsome German man with strong arms began scrubbed me briskly with a brush. Over every centimeter of me fore and aft, stem to stern. Cultural experience I breathed to myself. Cultural experience. Cultural experience. I was glowing with cleanliness as I was ushered by the arm to a shower by the far wall. I washed off the lather, and next stepped into a pool of ice water. I gasped in shock—and this was the only time any of my fellow bathers acknowledged me verbally—a few men chuckled. I thought please God do not let me have a heart attack. I dipped into the pool braced for instant death. No one stayed for much time, and neither did I. After a few more warm pools—jet streams pummeled my body with warm water—I was led by an attendant into a drying and resting room. In the darkened room I saw pallets lining the walls and filling the interior, and on most of them, wrapped snugly in blue blankets, men were sleeping. I was led to a pallet and draped in a warm bath sheet and then enfolded in a heated blanket. Thus cocooned, I stayed there for a long time, roused only a few times by the soft snores of the fellows around me. The protocol for leaving the room was to wear the bath sheet into the next room, and so I arrived in a solarium of glass walls and potted plants and teak lounge chairs, 
each with a lamp and a table with magazines. I stopped for a glass of fruit infused water, settled down and pondered my own place in the universe. Later I found my way back to the dressing room, no longer fretting about nakedness in the room now thronged with well-dressed men who had gotten there before me. I dressed, carefully adding my final dressing touch of pearl necklace and earrings—always my badge of civility and order in a complex world. I departed through a turnstile, leaving my wrist badge at the catchment post.
On my way out, I paused to talk to the man at the counter who had greeted me four hours earlier. How was it, I wondered, that on coed bathing day I was alone with so many men? Ah! He said, there are four such days a week, and on the other three, men and women bathe separately. By custom, however, on coed days most men turn to the left at the top of the stairs, and women turn to the right. And how would I have known that, I asked sweetly? There was no need to inform you, Madame. It is coed bathing day.
I left that place of time not of time and space and re-entered the world in evening dusk, the world I knew. But as I walked through the streets of town to home and my husband waiting for me by the fireplace with a good brandy, I felt I could have negotiated treaties and managed vast acquisitions and stood between warring armies on the battlefield and brought peace to all. That is why people go to the Friedrichsbad, and why I will return.
Recent Comments