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Never Accept Free Massages
Recently I enjoyed my first hammam experience in the Middle East. It had been a long sweaty day walking around in Bosra in the stifling heat and I felt sorry for the person who had to sit next to me on the bus back from Bosra. However I’d arranged to meet a friend at Hammam Malik Al-Zahir next to the Umayyad Mosque.
The hammam was easy enough to find as it was on my map of Damascus and it was situated quite close to my house, so I dumped my bags off and headed over to the side street where it was located.
The first place you enter in a hammam is a big room with sofas around the edge, occupied by men sitting around in towels. Given that this was my first time in a hammam I had no idea what to do or expect, so I stood near the desk for a while looking puzzled and eventually one of the workers came up to me and started speaking in arabic, which I naturally couldn’t understand. Eventually he directed me towards the seats and spoke some works I could understand so I undressed myself and left my clothes in a box leaving myself wearing nothing but a towel and some clogs they had given me. All my valuables went into a locked box and the gave me a key to put around my hand like the type you get in swimming pools.
I then got asked if I wanted a facial, which was 600SYP, which I politely declined, and luckily my friend Will, from Edinburgh, came out at that point and took me into the actually bath part, which I entered with difficulty as the clogs I had been given were two different sizes and just annoying to walk with. They also gave me some sort of a bowl with a coarse cloth, shampoo and soap.
The inside of the hammam was nice: it just consisted of two rooms with a steam room and a sauna connected. The sauna wasn’t that great, but I don’t think it was used that much as it was hidden away in a corner. The steam room however was ridiculously steamy. I couldn’t spend longer than a minute in there without feeling like my skin was burning off, but as soon as you get out you grab your bowl, fill it with cold water and just chuck it all over yourself. Extremely refreshing.
Given that it was my first time I wanted to try everything that the hammam had on offer, so I asked for a “scrubbing down”. Now this was extremely painful.This involves a big man with a cloth that feels like sandpaper rubbing it vigourously across your skin until everything feels red and raw and he soaps you up and washes it all off. It was painful however it did make my skin feel a lot better afterwards.
I also had a massage as well which was the same sort or style as the “scrub down”: violent. I lay on my back while a man dug his fingers into my muscles and he cracked my back, followed by him turning me over and shoving his elbow into several places in my back. Again, similar to the scrub down, whilst it was painful at the time, afterwards it felt good.
After I’d showered off and had a few more goes in the steam room I headed for the exit where were were greeted by a man with towels, who toweled us off and wrapped us up well. We then went through to the big room again and went to the sofas and sat down, ordering tea and water. Whilst waiting for tea and water a big man came up to me with a pile of towels and proceeded to undress me and redress me with even MORE towels until there was nothing left showing of my body except for a bit of my face.
Soon the tea came and I gradually took off a few towels so as to be able to drink my tea without hassle and we sat and chatted for a while. This is when Will revealed to me that apparently some hammams are a bit more hands on than others. Apparently his friends had had a bit of a bad experience in another hammam. They had been chatting to some locals in there and the locals had offered them a free massage, which was fine until another man swapped in and started giving a rather inappropriate massage to them. Luckily they managed to escape from that situation, however my landlord Ahmed revealed to me that there are some hammams that have an undercover gay community, even though, as it’s illegal, there are “no homosexuals” in Syria according to the government, so you have to watch out which one you go to, and if it comes down to it: Never accept a free massage…
