Spring Break: Italy & Tunisia, part III (a highlight, finally)

Okay, so I'm sorry that this has been awhile...
Finals and my apartment and cursory internet access and a variety of other things have kept me from being a good blogger--I have several written, they just need to be "prettied up" and posted. Due to a camera disaster including both the camera and the memory cards, I lost all my spring break photos and then randomly found them today.
So one or two might show up soon, as will all my photos of Mom, Dad, and Lindsey's Egypt "Adventure".
It's sad/hysterical!
Without further ado--the highlight of my trip to Tunisia!
I stare at the white ceiling, a white ceiling pocketed with small square skylights slightly mildewed from years of steam and heat. And I feel like my skin is being roughly torn off—probably because it is. And I begin to make a list—a shopping list for next time I lie here.
1. exfoliating gloves
2. 2 bars of orange-blossom soap
3. 1 pumice stone
4. 1 fluffy towel
5. boyshort underwear, preferably in hot-pink satin or an animal print (zeebrah?)
6. enough alcohol or coffee to overcome the initial shock of being here
The list complete, I move onto thought #2:
I am an American girl studying in Egypt. What the hell am I doing mostly naked in a Tunisian hamman (a traditional bathhouse)?
Visitors to Turkey and Syria describe their hamman visits with images recalling a spa, with plenty of privacy, plenty of clothing on bodies, and luxury facials and pedicures.
Privacy? Clothes? Pedicures? Not so much.
As I drift back to consciousness after being asked/forced to roll over, I realize three things: one, yes, entire layers of skin have now peeled off my body and ouch, does that make the hot water sting. Kind 30-something Tunisian women inquire “Il est mal?” “Non, il est bon, merci”. It’s not bad, it’s fine, I just never realized that this level of exfoliation was possible. Two, my soaking-wet self is being pulled and dragged across a tile platform like a limp fish or a dying mermaid and then scoured by a 70-year-old woman wearing itty-bitty leopard print silk shorts. Only leopard print shorts. Three, this makes me realize I am lying in a room full of 30 women and wearing a not-so-covering black bikini bottom. And the panic begins to set in again…
I have a very American attitude toward nudity—at least toward personal nudity. The Europeans can keep their prolific nude beaches—I like certain parts of both my upper and lower anatomy to be covered at all times, thank you very much. So being asked to voluntarily spend a couple of hours half naked in a semi-public setting? Scary—no terrifying.
As I look across toward my friend, we exchange a small smile that says “we’re going to be okay”—while a mere 15 minutes earlier we had been forced to count to three and emit a small, pained whimper as as removed our tops. By now we’ve realized the all-important concept… no one cares.
In all three main bathing rooms, women wash themselves, their friends and their family, while their young daughters shriek and run away from have their hair shampooed.
The frist room is cool with small faucets, a place to rinse or dry off. The second room is the cold room as well as the largest—a tile platform big enough for 10 women to lay on in the middle, wide benches around the exterior, and a cistern of cool water. The third room is dark like a cave, with dull white walls and the rusty brown-red of henna prints on the walls. Steam billows from the near-boiling water kept at one end of the room. It’s womb-like and moist and feminine.
At this point, I’m most impressed with these women’s undergarments. I always wondered in Cairo who was really buying all those barely-there lace g-strings—apparently the more covered you are on the outside, the more likely you are to be wearing black mesh, flirty embroidery, and fake crystal danglies, or a savannah full of animal prints.
As I sit longer, women come and talk to me, showing me the place where there sister placed a henna print on her wedding day or discussing, in an odd mixture of French and Arabic, the Tunisian education system. And I begin to think of this place not just as a building to get clean, but as a potential equalizer. It’s impossible to feel intimidated by or judgmental about a woman you have talked to half naked. So here’s the deal DC: let’s get over the nudity issues, open a hamman, and be able to walk into our internships and our jobs knowing that the boss-employee intimidation factor is gone. You know what that other woman is hiding under her too-formal business suit. You’ve talked about good-smelling soaps and governmental reform; maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ve even scrubbed one another’s back rather than stabbing it.
So keep the pedicures, the private room, and the concealing towels—I’ll take my hamman Tunisian style.