Bathhouse Blues

I have just washed for the first time in a week. Infact, its been the first time in a week that I have changed my underwear. While this may sound like fairly horrendous overshare to you, for the local Moroccan this piece of info passes for regular day-to-day banter. In the way we may compare a new pairs of shoes or salary slips, they compare body odour. So when the weekly wash arises, the local 'Haram' or bathhouse is packed to the rafters with filthy, overweight, bear-like locals. The only lighting in these marble mausoleums a small beam through a stained-glass window, like some bizarre religious redemptive ritual. And they scrub. And scrub. And scrub. Peeling off vast wads of yellow skin in the process. Our host, Ebrahim  - who had just tried to trick us into paying double for the entrance so he could pocket the difference - threw me his exfoliating glove and, with a sardonic glint in his eye said 'Yes - you use'. Normally this wouldnt have been a problem - except that he had just used it, rather aggressively, for 20 minutes on himself and another 20 minutes on his friend creating a fine brownish layer of dead skin over the whole glove. Given the 7 day old layer of dirt I had (less gloatingly) accumulated and given that his expression was not one of compassionate understanding, I set to work. Scrubbing away 1200 year old dirt accumulated in the narrow markets of ancient medina of Fes, the pungent smells of the 500 year old leather tanneries, the smoke and rotten banana odour of the Arabian bachelor pad we had stayed in, the animal musk of feral monkeys and Egyptian cobras draped on us in the town square in Marrakesh, the goat-head stew we ate for dinner and, the pungent tang of the baths of perfume apparently rolled in by the women here and, of course, Tough Guys regular Dutch-ovening of our sleeping quarters.

These odours are now thankfully extolled and I am born anew to accumulate a new layer of grime - both good and bad.