My Friend, the Bucket

At my homestay, showering is something of a process. In the absence of any real running hot water, my host sister has to heat up a pot of water on the stove and then I take a bucket into the bathroom and do my thing, letting the water drain down our Turkish toilet.

Luckily, Morocco has a special institution devoted to alleviating this process (and alleviating my smell after not showering for nearly a week), and this magical place is called hammam (the public baths). It elevates the bucket shower not only to something that is tolerable, but something that is even enjoyable.

You begin by accumulating supplies at home: towel, clean change of clothes, shampoo and soap (you can even by special olive-based soap in the market), a small scooping bucket, and an amazing Moroccan scrubby glove, amusingly called a “kiss” in Arabic.

When you arrive at hammam, you store your bags and strip down. For men, most choose to keep on their underwear, though some prefer to go all the way. I hear that women tend to hammam in the buff (though some keep undergarments on for modesty) – but I’ll never really be able to confirm this one way or the other, as the sexes are completely segregated through the process.

Once rid of your dirty clothing, pick up a bucket or 2 from the front desk and then enter the hammam proper, consisting of three rooms, each one progressively hotter and steamier as you move through. The first destination is the hottest room, where scalding water is constantly running from the faucet into a basin and people are constantly filling and dumping buckets of it, which never fails to remind me of Fantasia – as if any minute the Sorcerer will run in and put a stop to the whole scene Mickey has dreamed up.

After quickly washing out your bucket, you dump some water onto the floor tiles to heat them up, and then for anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour, you just lie down and relax, taking in the biggest breaths of the thick, steamy air that you can manage. Eventually it is time to actually get clean, and you apply your first coat of soap – preferably the olive stuff if you have it. After this, the “kiss” comes into play, and you rub yourself raw, removing all of the dead skin and grime which builds up after a week of medina life. Naturally, it’s about impossible to scrub your own back, so it’s necessary to ask a friend, family member, or perfect stranger to help you out. It’s a very literal example of the proverb “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Every time I go in, it always amuses me to see an entire room of practically-naked men scrubbing and massaging each other in the midst of a society where homosexuality is not only a mortal sin, but is simply thought not to exist at all.

It’s usually around this point that my host brother Hisham – who is, by the way, maybe 30-something and at least 200 pounds – tells me to flip over onto my stomach and then proceeds to crack my back and contort my arms and legs, releasing all of the week’s tension. It’s amazing.

After rinsing all of the dead skin off with the hot water (and yes – you can see the skin coming off – it’s kind of gross), you move into the other two chambers and fill up the bucket again with cooler water. Here, you shampoo your hair and lather up your body with soap as you would in any typical shower, and then rinse off using the bucket system.

Once you’re done with this, you move back into the reception area, reclaim your bags, and dry off. However, far from done, most Moroccans just tend to hand around for a bit and socialize or lay down on the benches to relax. Also, you can do any necessary shaving here. I was surprised to find that besides their facial hair, lots of young Moroccan men also tend to shave their chests and armpits, while the older crowd with often shave their whole heads.

Finally, after 1 and a half to 2 hours, it is time to change into your clean clothes and go home. Hammam takes the idea of a long, steamy shower and elevates it to a new level. But for the next few days, you feel cleaner and your skin feels healthier and softer than ever before. This is one tradition that America should totally catch on to.