WARNING: This Blog Post deals with female nudity.  If you’d rather not read “nude” material, please return another day.

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Still here?

When my globe-trotting friend, Ardyth, discovered I was stopping in Budapest during my recent European travels, she urged me to take advantage of that city’s thermal baths. “Don’t miss experiencing the famous Gellért Baths,” she suggested. “Be sure to have a massage. Don’t leave Budapest without doing that.”

It’s no secret that the world’s largest thermal water cave system,170 caves containing 80 geothermal springs, lies under Hungary’s capital city. Seventy million liters of 21-78 degrees Celsius water (that’s 82-172 degrees Fahrenheit) gushes up daily from natural springs.

Since I live part-time near Las Vegas, a city touting many amazing spas/pools, why do that in Budapest? I don’t know how to swim, my bathing suit is 30-years old, and, at my age, I practice camouflage-mode. I really don’t “do” swimsuits and pools.

Besides, there’s enough to see in Budapest, I thought, with its UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Danube cruises, Szechenyi Chain Bridge, markets and monuments, without pausing to “take a bath”.

I returned my bathing suit to its moth balls.

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 BUDAPEST:  After discovering, despite my activity-list, I still had a free afternoon in Budapest, I decided to Spa. It helped that Linda, who’d I just met, was also game. I must admit to being relieved at having a partner-in-bathhouses. Linda, being from California, had packed her bathing suit and, thinking I could improvise, I grabbed my t-shirt and shorts. Clutching a handful of Forints, the Hungarian currency, we hailed a taxi and headed for those famous Gellért Baths:

 The Good: “This was definitely a unique experience, a “Hungarian water world,” of sorts,” she remembered, in her recent e-mail.

The Bad:  “But, it was as if we made a wrong turn and ended up at a state prison,” she lamented.

 The Ugly: Personally, it was intimidating for me to walk into an alien, albeit breathtakingly beautiful, environment and be greeted with a chilly reception, the afternoon’s precursor. During the entire four-hour visit, not ONE person smiled or was kind. Must be a Staff Rule.

I’m a skeptic as well as a coward and suggested re-hailing the cab. But Linda, already charging into the gorgeous main hall, with its Art-Nouveau glass roof, had found the check-in office. We got the most uncooperative young woman we’d yet encountered in Hungary. (Our Budapest city tour guide had warned us about this.) It took 15 minutes and countless heavy sighs from her, to purchase, “The Works”. We had no idea what “The Works” (our translation) cost but were told it included everything.

At the get-go it was apparent my shorts and t-shirt were verboten. I could rent. (You must be kidding!)  Or, buy. We headed for the adjacent bathing suit store. Suspecting a tall, good-looking, blond California woman has purchased more beach apparel than I ever would, I looked to Linda for guidance. She glanced at me, scanned the rack and grabbed a suit. I surrendered the rest of my Forints to the clerk. In 1981, my last suit purchase, I chose black. Visualize a brown and orange one-piece, strung with wooden beading, made in China. That’s the new Me.

 

This is when the real problems began. We walked into the Spa and showed our passes. The door man, who did speak English, demanded towel money.

      “What?” Linda said. “We already purchased our tickets.”

      “I know, but now you must purchase a towel for 886 forints ($4 American dollars) each,” the door man insisted.

     “You mean these tickets don’t include towels?” Linda inquired, incredulously.

     “No, they don’t,” he replied.

      “Well, how are we going to get dry if we don’t have towels?” she asked, now fuming.

     (This is when he gives her a “that’s the point” glare!)

      “Well,” she says, “we are not paying for towels.” 

If you remember, I’d already blown $250 on laundry at a Warsaw hotel. Heck, four bucks a towel, that was chump change. But, Linda, a successful entrepreneur, was not having it.“My perspective was that a deal’s a deal,” she told me. “I mean we were told it was all-inclusive pricing, right?”

Okay, no towels.

We were greeted inside by Mrs. Stern Matron #1.( I instantly realized most of the female spa-goers were wandering around in the buff, which left me uncomfortable, mortified, and squirming. I am not proud of my inhibitions.) She wrote 4 p.m. on a clipboard, handed us each a white sheet and pointed upstairs. Rather clueless, we suspected 4:00 pm was our massage time.That would give us two-hours in the baths.  We climbed the stairs to change into suits.

Already, I’m thinking, “I am going to kill Ardyth.”

We leave our possessions with Mrs. Stern Matron #2 who locks them in cabinets but keeps the keys. Clutching our sheets (everyone else has towels), we head for the thermal baths. I picked the pool with the least number of nude women and navigated from hot baths to cold dips to saunas to steam rooms, keeping my head down and using my sheet as a towel.

Linda liked the thermal baths but soon headed for the swimming pool where she got kicked out for not having a swimming cap. (Let’s not even discuss her purchasing one.) She returned to the hot baths, totally unconcerned and uninhibited by all the nude, primarily older women, who were in the baths.  No one talked, smiled or laughed, except us.

At 4pm, we left our wet gear with our unfriendly matron who loaned us keys to get our underwear. After wrapping ourselves in our sopping wet sheets, we headed for our massages. My masseuse led me to a room and was immediately miffed at having to provide a “dry” sheet. Using gestures, she told me to totally strip and get on the table, face down on the sheet. I do not remember much about the 40-minute massage. I do remember that I was cold, totally naked, uncovered, bare-assed and interacting with a stranger who never murmured a word to me, not even in Hungarian.

Really, I am going to kill Ardyth.*

Linda’s experience was far worse. She did not even rate a room. “My massage was unique,” she told me,“in that the masseuse left the curtain open and I was eye-to-eye with a woman who was hooked up in some kind of neck constraint in what, I’m hoping, was a therapy pool “

“And, will you ever forget the rock music (American) playing in the background?” she asked.

Following our massages, wrapped back in our sheets, toga-style, we couldn’t re-claim our clothes, get dressed and exit fast enough. We did delay our get-away ten minutes to help a young American woman, a honeymooner, who was gifted “a spa afternoon” by her new husband. We left her in tears.

Wonder how that marriage is going.

We found a cab, returned to our hotel, and headed for the bar, where we drank our Supper and ate free peanuts.

“Didn’t you feel like we might be expelled at any moment?” Linda asked me.

If the Gellért Baths are about sophistication and being cosmopolitan, I thought to myself, I’m just not there yet. It’s going to take some real work!

There are morals to this story:

1.Inhibitions or not, I fervently believe women over sixty should keep their nudity to themselves and not share it with others.

2. Principles or no principles, if you’re going near water, take a towel. Sheets are non-absorbable.

3. Travel leads you down many memorable paths and provides an  inordinate amount of pleasure, fun and experiences.

 

*My friend,Ardyth is still alive. No one enjoyed this story more than she.