Zong

WARNING: contents of the following article may offend hygiene conscious readers. To protect the modesty of the participants, no pictures are provided.
Traveling in a simple van like mine in a cold environment and minimised water usage excludes regular showers or baths other than the ones with a flannel (Washlappen), a bowl of heated water and my doggybath. So reading about a public bath and the prospect about a shower and washing hair under running water is really exciting!
After needing to stop and park the vehicles on the steep, rutted hill because we fear we might ruin our vehicles in the pursuit of our hygienic endeavor we march to find the public bath. It is as well we parked the vans where we did, because the bath ended up to be on a different location as the map showed us. (Well, that's no news to us. In this part of the woods the mapping does not always reflect the actual location).
After asking several locals we finally find it- a quite decrepit hut , not indicating it's purpose to the foreign eye.
I enter the women's section to find myself in an ante room about 2.5x2.5m, a slim timber board on each side, to sit on whilst changing your clothes. About 8-10 children were in there of different ages and different stages of dress or undress.
From this room an open doorway directly leads into the the huge bathtub about the same size as the ante room in which several women enjoy the process of cleaning themselves.
First I of course have to find out where the cue starts or ends, so i point at the children and ask "tamam" which I know in turkish means "ready", and I hope in Farsi it means the same. But my hope to make myself understoid gets ruined right away as the girls start to giggle and say blablabla tamam. Until today I am non the wiser what I said.
Doesn't matter, I made them laugh, and am shown, they are ready to leave and it is my turn to undress and join the ladies in the soapy tub.
Here I am now, soaking away and trying to communicate in bits of English, some shabby Farsi and even shabbier russian but we enjoy each other's company. Out of the wall sticks a pipe from which spouts fresh, hot water. The ladies fill tin after tin of water, pour it over me. We scrub each other's backs and shampoo each other's hair. Once done and rising out of the suddsy floods, they douse me with more tins of fresh hot water to rinse me clean.
This process might not satisfy our westerners's idea of hygiene, but it definitely gave me a lot of simple, unexpecting and unexpected sisterly love and affection and a lot of fond memories.Read more