It was located in a large building with the ladies entrance on the right and the mens on the left. I walked in one of the ladies’ doors to see a small group of local women sitting on the floor in a circle with a big bowl of veggies, chicken and couscous in the middle. They were having lunch, traditional bread in their hands where we would have a fork, all digging in. Without question, they immediately invited me to join, so naturally I did. Expecting a hammam, I was a little confused but loved the random wonderfulness of it. And the food was as delicious as I remembered.

Forty-five years ago I spent a year and a half on my bicycle riding through Europe and North Africa with my first husband. In Tunisia we biked across the Atlas Mountains down into the Sahara Desert. It was hell and gone off the beaten track and we were often invited in for food. The veggie, chicken, couscous dish was the staple and I loved it. It was then that I was also invited for my first hammam.

In a nutshell, a hammam is a communal bath house involving sweat, hot water, soap, and a scrub. It was a small village in the mountains; the tiny cement building had a large wood furnace in the centre, surrounded by a circular half high cement wall with bench’s built into it, and a water cistern. It was me and all the village women, young and old. They stoked up the fire hot enough to make a sauna, took off their burka’s, soaped up their bodies and scrubbed each other down, including me. Then they poured pails of hot water all over each other. I remember tightly packed bodies, a lot of laughing, much raucously spoken Arabic (no one spoke English) and a strong sense of caring. It was a memorable and impactful experience for 20-year old me.

Anyway…back to the present. Once we were finished lunch one of the ladies led me out of the room and into the correct door for the hammam. Ahhh…got it!

It was essentially the same process as the first time but with much more finesse, style, comfort and modern facilities. I was led to a large, warm, clean, circular tiled room with a central platform and eight marble table slabs coming out from the wall by a smiling young woman who spoke no English. There were five or six local women there and two pubescent girls. Everybody was naked as a newborn and in some stage of the progression. There were no barriers or towels and I admired how comfortable they were in their nakedness among the sisterhood. The sight of an wizened old grandmother sitting and brushing her spry young granddaughters newly washed hair was so tender and beautiful it pierced me to my core. It was all very ‘just another weekly hammam’ for them. But for me, it was an intimate blending into another culture.

Body positivity is an ongoing work-in-progress for me and when I was told to undress I was initially self-conscious. But of course no one was remotely interested in me and I decided to let my body image dysfunctions drain out with the hammam water. Buck naked, in all my jiggly fish belly white glory, I was seated on a marble block (close to the grandmother and her granddaughter) where my attendant soaped me up all over with the local soft black olive soap. Again, it took some energy for me to relax with being attended to in that way… but while in Rome… I was then placed in a marbled steam room for about 10 minutes before she led me to one of the slabs and rinsed me off with pails of comfortably hot water. It was so slippery I was afraid I would shoot right off (I didn’t). Did she like her job I wondered. Was it interesting? What was going through her mind right then? (probably what was for dinner). I quieted my inner dialogue and laid on the marble slab. She proceeded to vigorously scrub every inch of my increasingly relaxed body with an exfoliating glove and some kind of paste. She washed and conditioned my hair and then more rinsing. The finale was a brisk, energetic 10 minute all over massage with a scented oil. The whole process took about 45 minutes.

I imagined Arabic women in their burkas to be more body inhibited than we are (and by that I mean me) in our culture, but that was not the case. They were relaxed and comfortable. And once I decided to lean into it, the experience was wonderful, invigorating and liberating.