First Time in a Hammam
Saturday Afternoon, Caleb and I, accompanied by our buddy Alae, decided to check out a Hammam. For those who don’t know, a Hammam is a hot Moroccan bathhouse, where people go for a good cleaning and a social.
However, before we could go to the Hammam, we needed to go to the Medina and buy a couple important items. Firstly, we needed a beaker to pour water from big buckets onto ourselves.
Next, we needed to buy a washing mitt. Now you would expect this to be soft and nice, but it felt like sandpaper and is used to scrub dead skin and dirt off your body.
Finally we needed to buy a special soap. Called savon noir (black soap) it is made out of olive oil and good for getting all the dirt and oil off you.
When we got to the hammam, on a semi-sketchy sidestreet, we had to disrobe down to our boxers and trade our clothes for two buckets, used for bathing water. We then entered the steaming chamber. Inside were three adjoining rooms of varying temperatures- the further in you went, the hotter it was. We collectively decided on the middle room, which was hot enough to sweat, but not hot enough that you couldn’t enjoy it. We the proceeded to fill our three buckets from taps on the wall, clean the floor on which we were to sit, then sit and pour the warm water on ourselves and begin to rinse.
The coolest experience of the hammam was having someone scrub us all down. Part of the experience is after applying the black soap to our bodies, you give one of the attendants your sandpaper mitt, and they proceed to scrub you down. AND IT HURT! It was like he was trying to scrape all the brown off of me, then was surprised when I was brown underneath that haha. But he used the glove over most of our bodies (certain areas were, thankfully, exempted), and scraped all the dead skin, dirt, soap, and other things off. This process left us a little red, but very clean!
After this, we spent more time just enjoying the heat. I decided to fill one of our buckets up with cold water- which was really just lukewarm and pour it on myself- much to the shock of Alae who didn’t, and still doesn’t, understand how nice cold water feels after you’ve been sitting in a steaming hot room for a couple hours…. Maybe because he’s not Canadian :p
After we had enough heat for one day, we did a final rinseoff and went out to the change area to sit and cooldown for another half hour and watch the english action movie on the screen there. We then got packed up, paid the $4 for the whole experience then very dehydrated went to get cold water.
All in all it was an amazing experience. One which I plan to repeat many times while I’m here. For many, the hammam, like a coffee shop, is a social experience as well as a bathing experience. However, others go once every month or every few months. In any case, it’s easily one of my new favourite Moroccan experiences.