Experience at the Hamam

June 12th, 2014

Today I went to the Hamam with Sarah, Selma, and Sam.  The Hamam is a communal bathing center. It is an elaborate process of cleaning oneself while also being a social activity where women go together to talk and spend time and wash one another.  It was honestly a really fun time.  At first it is a bit weird to be completely naked with so many women that you don’t know, but with time you realize it is just the way it is.  First you are in a room where you undress.  From there, every room that you go into is more hot than the first.  It is like being in a sauna.  You choose a room and fill your buckets with water and begin to rinse yourself.  Next you take a mix of henna and olive soap and rub your entire body with it.  It is a blackish green color.  Then you rinse yourself again.  Following the soap, they take a hand cloth which is made out of very scratchy black material.  They scrub your skin for you.  I stood in front of Sarah as she scrubbed my entire body.  It is so rough that your skin turns completely red and layers of grey skin peel off of you.  After, you rinse your body again and go into the cooler room to wash your hair.  We sat in this room for at least a half hour just rinsing and re-rinsing.  It was honestly so fun.  It was like a huge bath time.  Just playing with water and washing yourself with your friends.  It’s a really friendly activity.  Honestly, my skin has never been so soft and clean! You then go back into the first room and dry off and redress in warm clothes so as not to shock your system going from the heat to a cooler temperature.  You also wrap your hair.

In Moroccan culture there is a lot of superstition about the cold.  If you sit on the floor, they will come give you a blanket or a mat to sit on because they believe that the cold of the floor will come up to your ovaries and make it so that you cant have babies.  Cold makes people sick and even kills them.  If you went outside with wet hair, even though it is so warm here, and then later you have a stomach ache, they will say it is because you were in the cold.

Later that night, it was Anass' birthday. We stayed up until 3 am because his sister Hooda was making cake for him.  Everyone fell asleep on the couch.  But at 3 we woke everyone up and we celebrated his birthday, singing happy birthday in Arabic, French, and English.  We took tons of family photos and ate tons of cake.