Public bath houses

In China there's a huge variety of living conditions. Some buildings, even in my city, are very modern. You can walk into many apartments and feel like you're in an American apartment. Yet there are also people living in bunks in their office at my school or in the restaurant they own. In some places there's running water and hot water heaters, you can get hot water from the tap and/or take a hot shower but it still very common to live in places where you don't have your own bathroom, shower, hot water, or any running water. Because of all this bath houses are very common in China. They are especially common in a old, small, undeveloped city like the one I live in. I've heard their are ranges of bath houses. They receive letter grades just like restaurants do. In China the restaurant's letter grade is posted near the door for all to see. (I've still only ever seen one A!) As for restaurants there are a lot of Bs, almost no As and Cs are only really common in small holes in the wall, where as long as the food is still hot you don't have to worry about eating it. For bath houses I'm not so sure, I've only ever gone to one and it has an A. But I was told by the friends I've gone with that this bath house is a lot nicer than the other ones they've been to.

So what is a bath house? A bath house is a mix between a public shower (like the ones at a swimming pool or gym) and a spa. But in no way can you call a bath house a spa. If you were told a bath house was a spa you'd be very disappointed when you got to the bath house! The one I got to is very fancy and you don't see very poor people at it, but you do see a lot of older people who are not well off. Yet you also see very posh skinny Chinese girls teetering on their 5 inch heels in and out of the place.

Firstly, the bath house I go to is remarkably clean. The entrance is very warm and has all marble floors (like all the floors in China). You take your shoes off in a little pit then you can step out of it in your socks or bare feet onto the floor that is constantly being cleaned by the attendants in the room. Along the edge of the small-ish entrance room there are couches and chairs to sit in. There's also a front desk where they take your shoes and clean them for you.

There are separate rooms for women and men (duh) each one has its own locker-room. You get a "key" which is a bracelet with a magnet on it that only works for one locker of which the number is on the bracelet as well.

After the locker room there's a room with showers all along the walls and massage beds up and down the middle. Then there's a big opening into another similar room which is smaller and only has a few showers and a few massage beds but also has a sanna and a steam room. For the low low cost of 15rmb  you get entrance to the bath house for as long as you want, well I'm sure there's a limit of some sort, but I've stayed their hours before, so if there is it's pretty long. It's a really nice experience it's so warm and the hot water never runs out!

But the fun part of the bath house is the "treatments" you can get there. You can get normal spa like things, like different types of massages. There are also full body treatments, where they rub stuff on you. You can get normal substances rubbed on you like body wash but there are also strange ones, like a milk rub and a honey rub (the honey rub looks like wax). You can get a traditional Chinese treatment too, which are still common done even among the youths in China. These include having bad wind sucked out of you by putting hot cups on your back which act as suction cups leaving your skin seriously brused for up to a month, they can last longer if you get it gone regularly. There's also the repetitive scratching of your skin when you have muscle aches which is meant to help the healing process but actually is just the classic distraction method of treatment. This treatment leaves your skin with red gashes that makes you look like you've been attacked by an animal. But the best thing you can get done at the bath house is a scrub! This is one of the Chinese things that should really be brought to the US.

I mean, when you think about lying down completely naked on an extremely slippery surgical looking bed  covered in a thin layer of plastic in the middle of a large room filled with naked Chinese people showering to have a slightly clothed Chinese woman peel of your dead skin by rubbing down your naked body with a gritty mit it doesn't sound appealing. But it's the best thing in the world. It feels like getting a full body scratch. So it's a hundred times better than a head scratch. I think it might even be better than a massage. And at the end you can't stop touching yourself because your skin is so smooth. You also get really clean from it, even though you feel disgusting because the mit they clean you with ends up being really dirty and all the skin that falls off you is really dark too. But still, at the end you feel like a new person. Scrubs are slightly additive though, I know want to get one every week, which would probably not be good for my skin. Any time I start getting dry skin or start wanting to use lotion all the time I think "scrub time!"