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After Israel, I made it to Syria from Jordan rather easily, the little "stamp me on a separate piece of paper" thing working quite well.

Scrub Me, Baby!

Xtinemichaud
2005-12-23 16:49:22

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After Israel, I made it to Syria from Jordan rather easily, the little "stamp me on a separate piece of paper" thing working quite well.

Syria's polite and genuinely hospitable men were a welcome break after the sleaze overdose of Egypt and Jordan. However, Damascus' great mosque was just another mosque to me, and its supposedly unspoiled and mystique souq (market), in my humble opinion, didn't even come close to Jerusalem's timeless Islamic quarter.

Still, not in any way did this make my stay in Syria an uneventful one. Indeed, who would have thought this would be where I'd get to show off the results of my Bedouin waxing job (see the Cairo story), let alone to a naked sumo-wrestler size woman?

My guidebook said one of the highlights of Damascus was to visit a Turkish bath, or hammam as they are called in Arabic. Unfortunately, all the best and exquisitely decorated hammams cater to men only. Women are left with only one option, a very local institution that rarely sees any tourists. Yet when an adjnabiya does show up, she gets a treatment she's not likely to forget...

After getting directions from Kelly, a fellow traveler at my hotel, I found the women's hammam at the end of a narrow back alley, bearing a Arabic sign that simply read "hammam". I went through a first door, then followed a winding corridor through a curtain door and finally pushed into a large bright reception area. The room had a high vaulted ceiling with a glass dome, numerous colourful sofas lined every wall and Persian carpets lay everywhere. A ceramic fountain/pool adorned the centre of the room.

This being the local place that it was, obviously nobody spoke anything but Arabic. My limited vocabulary was therefore put to the test again, helped by a lot of nodding and grinning.

I was first invited (read ordered) to take all my clothes off save my underwear. ...