Thank God for 150 years of Turkish occupation. Not only did its legacy lead to a proliferation of kebab shops in Hungary, but it brought something else; something perfectly suited to get me out of the olfactory bind in which I now find myself.
I'm talking about Turkish baths. And more specifically, the Turkish bath five minutes away from my current residence in Buda.
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Gellért Bath.
It beats the hell out of Southside Pool.
After "the note" and the eviction from Kata's aunt's place, I packed up my stuff and moved across the Danube to Attila's flat, in Buda. What my change of venue lost in homeliness (a sink devoid of dirty dishes, cheese sandwiches waiting for me atop the Hungarian George Foreman every morning, flowers on the balcony, and all of the other trappings one might expect to find in the home of a 60-something-year-old woman), it made up for in lebensraum -- I got my own room, my own bed and plenty of space to scatter my things ... just like I do at home.
But it wasn't the dim lighting that bothered me; it was the fact that there was no gas in the apartment for the week that I happened to be staying there. And no gas means no hot water.
Which means no hot showers.
What resulted from this should come as no surprise: I smell. Bad. Like really bad.
Not only that, but there's something compounding this problem: I have hair now. I've finally admitted it to myself. The buzz cut I got from Garland and her friends the day before I left for London has inevitably entered Phase 2 -- the part where stuff starts looking crazy in the morning. The bad thing about Phase 2 is that, if you never wash it, your scalp begins to itch. And when your scalp begins to itch so bad that you start scratching your head like you're wearing a poison ivy do-rag, we all know what time it is: Selsun Blue time.
Don't even ask why I still haven't gotten around to buying more soap for my face. After months of being so good about including the well-being of my pores into my Nexium-and-toothpaste routine two times a day, I've just gotten lazy since I ran out of the stuff in Morges a few weeks ago.
So we've got B.O., dandruff and acne. Girls have just been beating each other with a stick trying to call dibs.
That's why I decided, after how wonderful both Széchenyi Bath and the piping hot showers at Kata's aunt's had been, I would kill two birds with one stone by walking down to the river the other day. That's where I would find yet another amazing Turkish bath, and also a post-bath shower room, where I could stand under a torrent of hot water until the cows came home.
I didn't meet any cool British girls this time, nor did I meet any American guys who had gone to ouzo, ouzo, ouzo, jail in Greece. But I met an indoor pool, plenty of warm baths, a sauna, an ice-cold tub of water for after the sauna, and an outdoor section that blew me away almost moreso than Széchenyi had.
Plus, I met a naked old dude in the shower who didn't understand that my silence in response to his repeated attempts at making small talk in Hungarian didn't mean that I was shy. It meant that I don't understand freaking Hungarian you psycho.
After building up a layer of ugh on my body thick enough to qualify my corpus for an archaeological dig, I can't quite describe how so fresh and so clean Gellért's free showers left me feeling. But there was something else there, which came as a complete surprise to me, which may have taken the cake for the coolest thing I did that day.
The wave pool.
Maybe it's some sort of psychological coping mechanism that the Hungarians have had to implement for a lack of access to real waves (the ancient Kingdom of Hungary once stretched all the way to the Adriatic and Black Seas, before being rolled back by a series of defeats at the hands of pretty much everyone the Magyars have ever called a neighbor). Or maybe the Gellért Hotel just thinks it's cool to have huge, artifical waves crash down on the people swimming in its pool every thirty minutes or so. But whatever the motivation for the Gellért gimmick, when they sound the warning in both Hungarian and English that in five minutes, "the waves are about to begin," people know that is the cue to jump in.
The cue to jump out, for me at least, was when I realized my time limit for still getting the exit discount was rapidly approaching its end. And that's when I headed for the showers.
Air-drying is normally not a big problem for me. I do it all the time. I did it last week at Széchenyi, for example. But air drying is a problem if you're pressed for time -- which I was after my ten-minute shower at Gellért -- and have forgotten to bring a towel -- which I did when I left Attila's flat that morning. In cases such as these, it's always good to have a Plan C: The automated hand-dryer.
If you think this was the first time I've ever been seen standing buck naked next to the sink in a public restroom, think again. I assumed I had reached a new low in my quest to find unorthodox applications for sink accessories back in July, when I stopped over in Bordeaux for one night en route to Cologne from Pamplona. At the youth hostel lucky enough to house such an exhibitionistic young man, I figured a good way to save money would be to simply utilize the free hand soap dispenser mounted on the wall beside the sink -- only two feet from the shower in the co-ed bathroom.
"There's no one else in here," I thought to myself, stupidly not double-checking first to make sure.
Of course, as Murphy's Law could have predicted, there was someone else in there. And even though all of my mad dashes from the shower to the sink -- periods in which I looked like Adam looking for Eve after a skinny dip in the lake -- lasted less than four seconds, I was embarrassingly spotted by an unsuspecting female during the final run. Too startled to ask what the hell it was that I was doing, she bolted out of the room before I could make out her face, clearly shaken by the spectacle she encountered before her eyes as she exited the stall nearest the sink: Naked Billy, dripping with water and clearly too cheap to buy a bar of soap for one euro at the nearest kiosk, desperately filling his cupped palm with a mountain of light purple, gooey liquid soap.
It was embarrassing to the point of not even being embarrassed. And after getting hit on by a gay dude at the nude beach in Den Haag, I had no qualms about what it was that I was about to do next to the sink at Gellért.
I can't even imagine what the men in the room adjacent to the shower room must have thought, but honestly, I didn't really care -- it's not like I know any of these people. Drying off your private parts so that you can put on a pair of boxers without subjecting yourself to "the rash" is a difficult task if you're using a traditional hand dryer; especially the scoof-maloof; especially if it's a hand dryer that is activated on a motion sensor, requiring that you hold one hand by the laser thingy at all times while you assume the position as best you can. It took about two minutes -- and about five different poses -- to do the job, but I got myself dry, and no one came in to arrest me or throw me out for public indecency.
I left Gellért feeling like I had accomplished something that day. I had paid full price (missing the exit discount by three minutes) for entrance to the bath, true, but I had maxed out the services they offered like a student credit card on a road trip to Florida for Spring Break, and I was finally smelling nice.
But that was a few days ago, and our hot water is still not on. Take a guess how I'm smelling now.
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