If the notion ever strikes you to step out of what we know as reality, I suggest a Turkish bath. One of the most surreal experiences Ive ever had. Situated just past Istanbul’s historical Grand Bazaar (world famous for its hundreds of store fronts, although all you could really buy there were rugs and leather products) sat the four hundred year old bath house. I walk in, pay, then a man yells at me in turkish and ushers me to some booth and hands me a thin towel. I think I'M suppose to get naked, but I'm not sure. I roll the dice and walk out into the lobby with nothing but a thin piece of linen keeping the world from seeing me in all my glory. I'm not sure what to do next so I just pick a door and walk through it. Part of me is worried that I'm going to walk into some holy Muslim room, and everyone is going to turn around and see that the sacred towel they gave me to wash my face, is being worn by me as underpants. Inside the room I saw my buddies all laying down on a hot concrete slab in the middle of a steam filled circular room. A tall dome ceiling sits two stories above us. Tiny moons and stars cut into the high ceiling are the only windows. Aside from the Muslim chants sneaking in through the moon star windows from outside, there is rarely any other sound. When there is the occasional door slam or Turkish yell, it echoes through the bath house for a good thirty seconds. I lay on the hot slab, basically naked, in this scene for thirty minutes. Eventually this Turkish man came in, and straight up gave me a bath. His job in life, is to wash men. At first he set a little pouch with strings on it on my chest and walked away. I wasn't sure if I was suppose to do something with it. I had been thinking that it was kind of unsanitary to have my bare junk just sitting on this slab where everyone lays down. So I decided in my mind that he had handed me some sort of jock strap. I was seconds away from putting it on when the man came back, grabbed the pouch, stretched it out, tied it around his wrist and wore it as some sort of scrubbing glove to exfoliate my skin. I began to imagine what would have happened if he had taken a few more seconds getting there, and came back to see me sticking my ‘bizness’ in his good washing glove. After exfoliating, he would scream at me in turkish to turn myself different ways on the hot slab while he poured bubbles all over me and washed me down. Whenever I was to sit up, or flip over, he would just slap me on the shoulder as hard as he could to let me know I was to change positions. This guy washed me hard. I’ve never been washed so hard. I looked around me and saw my other buddies laying on the hot slab, covered in bubbles, being washed, slapped and yelled at by these other turkish dudes. And it took all my incredibly relaxed muscles to keep from busting out laughing at the whole thing. Once the bath was over, he took me into another room, sat me on the floor, and then poured about ten buckets of water on my head, one right after each other. There is a fine line between turkish relaxation and Chinese water torture. After that I went into yet another room where I got an oil massage. He went to town, massaging, back cracking, karate chopping me. It was pretty fucking great, although I will say that the part where he massaged my bare oil soaked butt cheeks for three straight minutes might be the new chart topper for gayest thing I’ve ever done. (Beating the old chart topper of owning a sleeveless pink ‘Golden Girls’ t-shirt with the nipples cut out) The final leg of my pampering gauntlet consisted of being taken to the last room where there was a shower were I was to rinse all the massage oil off my exfoliated, cleaned, beaten body. When I turned the shower on, water came out the top of the shower head like normal, but then another, tiny stream of water shot out of second smaller nozzle located on the wall, waist high, which shot right into my groin. I'M not sure what that it was for. So far up to this point I had one man wash down my inner thighs, with his scrub glove smacking up against my balls, and another man rub my ass, so I said, 'fuck it', turned around, and decided the water stream was for cleaning out my butt hole. I |