Welcome to the second edition of Travel Library this Blogmas and today I’m reading Cathedrals of the Flesh by Alexia Brue. No, it’s not strictly a book about cold places but it is a book about hot baths and while none of them are in Iceland… well, there’s your link. Cold place, hot water. This is a book I wish I’d thought of writing myself, of the author’s journey around the world in search of the perfect hot bath.
Alexia starts her journey with the plan of finding out precisely what a real Turkish hamam is like so she and her friend Marina can open their own in New York, to make their love of bathing and relaxing their full time job. What size are the rooms? What temperatures are the baths? Where does the marble come from? What’s perfect about them that they can recreate? But as her journey continues into Greece, Russia, Finland and Japan, the project gets forgotten as Brue falls deeper and deeper in love with baths, bathing and bathing culture. In fact – spoiler alert! – they never end up opening that hamam, although Brue does co-found Well+Good, a blog/website about “navigating the wide (and wild) world of wellness”, so clearly plenty of the journey stuck with her.
The book is a bit disjointed – a semi-romantic and semi-illicit dinner in Turkey becomes a trip to Greece with no segue whatsoever. While Turkey is about learning hamam etiquette and going from novice to expert with a tiny tangent about an archaeological dig, Greece is all about a long-gone bath. In Moscow, the banyas are rough and ready, backstreet local things whereas they’re front and centre and a national symbol in Finland. And finally, there are the onsen and sento of Japan, two different types of public bath.
I was excited about reading this and I’ll definitely be expanding my hot water experiences beyond Iceland, with half an eye to writing my own book about it, if I can figure out how to not make it a copy of this one. And yet saying that… I somehow feel like this isn’t how I’d have written it. The opening chapter suggests a recently-graduated student who hasn’t quite figured out what to do with her life and has the sudden idea to make her passion into her career. But not much later, she’s definitely pushing herself as a long-term professional expert at public baths and their history and there’s definitely a hint of looking down at people who don’t know everything about how a hamam, banya, sauna, onsen or sento works, as well as on those who are more reluctant to embrace public nudity. It’s confusing. Who exactly is she? Why does she have so many contacts? And how is she funding six months travelling around the world bathing?
Two things make me a little dubious about her credentials. One is the Finnish woman teaching her to pronounce löyly as “Looohleee” which is just plain wrong – a “y” in Finnish is pronounced “oo” and löyly is closer to “leurgh-oloo”. Second is her directory of worldwide baths describing Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, which opened in 1992, although locals had dipped in its waste water since as far back as the early 80s, as “curing psoriasis and eczema patients for generations”. I’ll forgive the latter, just – there are hundreds of baths listed in the appendix, none of which she’d ever visited because you wouldn’t confuse geothemally-heated Icelandic local swimming pools with “thermal complexes”. The research here is clearly not done impeccably but it’s kind of an afterthought. The pronunciation of löyly is harder to let go, given that she acts as the ultimate public bath guru, teaching and explaining the terminology in each culture. How much more is she getting wrong, even in small ways?
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I shot through it in 24 hours, which is something I haven’t been able to do with a book for years. I realised how little I really know about bathing and hot water, how many places there are to try it and how it’s perfectly normal and acceptable to travel for no other reason than to soak. It makes me want to turn my house into a mini-spa, to tile floor and ceiling and seal the door to make an ordinary boring bathroom into a private sauna and to cut birch twigs to flagellate myself with. I’ve never been in a Finnish sauna! Right now I’m thinking of going to Helsinki in January or February and a sauna is definitely going on the itinerary, maybe even one of the ones in this book.
Because although I have a couple of niche issues with it, I like this book and I’m delighted that it exists. It’s given me a bigger and better appreciation of baths – in fact, TMI, but I’m writing this from a thyme- and juniper- scented* bath right now.
* Radox Original bubble bath. Sorry it’s not actually more exotic.