...Next to Godliness
At some point Sunday evening, well after I'd gotten home, shared hugs and endearments, pulled gifts from my bag and strewn travel detritus across the floor of the foyer, napped through half a football game, eaten orange-squash pie with ice cream and some nachos, and watched one and a half of the taped TV shows I'd missed over the past two weeks, Andy gently suggested that I ought to shower before going to bed rather than, as my habit, in the morning.
"I stink, huh?" I said, thinking of the clothes I'd been wearing for two days now (the jeans, more like four), through humid streets, on buses and airplanes and in smoky Spanish bars and restaurants, sometimes with a backpack on my shoulders, drawing sweat from my skin under the straps and against the padding.
"Yeah, kind of."
"Cigarettes, right?" He's been sensitive since he quit.
"Yeah, that, and...sick."
Standards of hygiene inevitably slip when every other night is spent on a bus, showers are frequently lukewarm, you packed light on clothes and are lazy about laundry and/or never in one place long enough to give wet clothes a chance to dry out completely, and most of your time is spent around backpackers who'd more bluntly be called "dirty hippies" at home and aren't exactly in a position to criticize. You can romanticize it, call it getting away from yourself, or some bullshit, but often its exhausted laziness, or a desire to not miss the end of breakfast (the day's free meal) yet still get out the door for the day by 9. Three days into the trip, after a long afternoon of biking around Cappadocia with Sarah and Nate, staring down the barrel of an overnight trip to Antalya and already checked out of my hotel room, I paid an arguably-excessive amount of money to use the arguably-touristy local hamam, and it was worth every kuru. I'd been warned that part of the experience is a bit of necessary revulsion at the amount of filth and dead skin that gets scrubbed off your body by the attendants, but was mostly mortified to see so much grey water polluting the pristine marble drainage channels of the hot room, though at least there were no other bathers to witness it, only a young woman who spoke no English and giggled when I twitched every time she touched the bottoms of my feet. We communicated in gestures and smiles and she let me take my time, catnapping a bit on the göbek taşı and making a second trip into the (entirely not traditional) sauna on my way out. I was cleaner leaving the hamam than at any other time in Turkey, but still had dirty hair, and was wearing some of the clothes I'd been biking in earlier. It would be downhill from there, when I started staying in budget accommodations with en-suite facilities (when they existed) consisting of a set of taps built into a wall of the bathroom, with a shower nozzle occasionally attached.* Most of them were poorly-ventilated and smelled faintly sewer-y. After I spoke to a friend of a friend in Istanbul who mentioned that Turkey has been experiencing prolonged near-drought conditions, I was even more reluctant to linger in the shower, and lineups for shared facilities in hostels convinced me to put it off until evening more than once. I got...not used to it, but accustomed. Same went for paying up to 1 YTL for the privilege of using squat toilets with no toilet paper (just wall taps and a small bucket - I carried baby wipes), and not being able to drink tap water.**
The bathroom in my apartment kind of sucks. It's not really ventilated, so has mold problems, all the fixtures are old and in rough shape, and the miniature clawfoot tub I found charming on our first walk-through is claustrophobic close to two years later. But it kicks the ass of 99% of private Turkish facilities, and the amount of hot water available isn't wholly dependent on how sunny it is that day.*** USA! USA! USA!
* This is a nicer-looking version of what I usually had access to. Note that the shower isn't physically separated from the rest of the bathroom. This makes for a whole set of fun issues and daily guessing games about spray patterns and where exactly to put a towel so that it's within reach but still likely to be dry by the time you need it.
** An ongoing debate in my Istanbul digs was whether it was necessary to rinse your mouth with bottled water after brushing your teeth. Though I didn't always take this extra precuation (usually because I was lugging around 1.5 liter bottles and already loaded down with bathroom stuff), I got into the habit of asking at restaurants whether they made tea with tap water before consenting to take a seat.
*** Lots of water is heated by solar power. This is cool most days, but even on the Mediterranean it rains sometimes, and it sucks to be denied a hot shower when you're rainwater damp and clammy.
"I stink, huh?" I said, thinking of the clothes I'd been wearing for two days now (the jeans, more like four), through humid streets, on buses and airplanes and in smoky Spanish bars and restaurants, sometimes with a backpack on my shoulders, drawing sweat from my skin under the straps and against the padding.
"Yeah, kind of."
"Cigarettes, right?" He's been sensitive since he quit.
"Yeah, that, and...sick."
Standards of hygiene inevitably slip when every other night is spent on a bus, showers are frequently lukewarm, you packed light on clothes and are lazy about laundry and/or never in one place long enough to give wet clothes a chance to dry out completely, and most of your time is spent around backpackers who'd more bluntly be called "dirty hippies" at home and aren't exactly in a position to criticize. You can romanticize it, call it getting away from yourself, or some bullshit, but often its exhausted laziness, or a desire to not miss the end of breakfast (the day's free meal) yet still get out the door for the day by 9. Three days into the trip, after a long afternoon of biking around Cappadocia with Sarah and Nate, staring down the barrel of an overnight trip to Antalya and already checked out of my hotel room, I paid an arguably-excessive amount of money to use the arguably-touristy local hamam, and it was worth every kuru. I'd been warned that part of the experience is a bit of necessary revulsion at the amount of filth and dead skin that gets scrubbed off your body by the attendants, but was mostly mortified to see so much grey water polluting the pristine marble drainage channels of the hot room, though at least there were no other bathers to witness it, only a young woman who spoke no English and giggled when I twitched every time she touched the bottoms of my feet. We communicated in gestures and smiles and she let me take my time, catnapping a bit on the göbek taşı and making a second trip into the (entirely not traditional) sauna on my way out. I was cleaner leaving the hamam than at any other time in Turkey, but still had dirty hair, and was wearing some of the clothes I'd been biking in earlier. It would be downhill from there, when I started staying in budget accommodations with en-suite facilities (when they existed) consisting of a set of taps built into a wall of the bathroom, with a shower nozzle occasionally attached.* Most of them were poorly-ventilated and smelled faintly sewer-y. After I spoke to a friend of a friend in Istanbul who mentioned that Turkey has been experiencing prolonged near-drought conditions, I was even more reluctant to linger in the shower, and lineups for shared facilities in hostels convinced me to put it off until evening more than once. I got...not used to it, but accustomed. Same went for paying up to 1 YTL for the privilege of using squat toilets with no toilet paper (just wall taps and a small bucket - I carried baby wipes), and not being able to drink tap water.**
The bathroom in my apartment kind of sucks. It's not really ventilated, so has mold problems, all the fixtures are old and in rough shape, and the miniature clawfoot tub I found charming on our first walk-through is claustrophobic close to two years later. But it kicks the ass of 99% of private Turkish facilities, and the amount of hot water available isn't wholly dependent on how sunny it is that day.*** USA! USA! USA!
* This is a nicer-looking version of what I usually had access to. Note that the shower isn't physically separated from the rest of the bathroom. This makes for a whole set of fun issues and daily guessing games about spray patterns and where exactly to put a towel so that it's within reach but still likely to be dry by the time you need it.
** An ongoing debate in my Istanbul digs was whether it was necessary to rinse your mouth with bottled water after brushing your teeth. Though I didn't always take this extra precuation (usually because I was lugging around 1.5 liter bottles and already loaded down with bathroom stuff), I got into the habit of asking at restaurants whether they made tea with tap water before consenting to take a seat.
*** Lots of water is heated by solar power. This is cool most days, but even on the Mediterranean it rains sometimes, and it sucks to be denied a hot shower when you're rainwater damp and clammy.