Thermae #2: Friedrichsbad

As soon as I began planning this adventure, Friedrichsbad stood out as the pinnacle of my pilgrimage. Actually, it inspired the notion of this being a pilgrimage, rather than 'just' a theme-vacation or business-plan-inspiring-research. Someone out there still calling their bathhouse a Bathing Temple. I have visited many lovely bathhouses, and sat in many powerful places of worship. I didn't know if anywhere in our modern world would truly be able to merge the two, but I knew I needed to be there.

As you've probably heard me enthuse, a supplicant to the Bathing Temple follows 17 steps of ablution and relaxation, for a total of 4 ritual hours, including the attentions of 3 varieties of masseuse. Upon leaving, one is guaranteed not only to win any contest of cleanliness, but also to be at least 1 fathom closer to enlightenment. According to autogenic legend, one's skin will take on a pearlescent sheen, one's gaze will remain clear and softly focused for 72 hours, and one's feet will not actually touch firmament for at least 24. All of this is true.

The ceremony unfolds thusly:

Step 1. Shower. (3min) (And right from the get-go, allow me to assure you that ALL the water, beginning with the showers and including the bubblers, flows from the famed local healing mineral springs.)

Step 2. Warm-air Bath. (54 ° C, 15min) Every surface in this room glows with gentle convection warmth, from the floors to the wooden lounge chairs.

Step 3. Hot-air Bath. (68 °, 5min) From a glow to a steady toast in a smaller oven.

Step 4. Shower. (1min)

Step 5. Soap and Brush Massages. (8min) Taken in turn, the vigorous soft bristles and creamy soap bubbles shed the last bits of whatever you were doing before you entered Friedrichsbad.

Step 6. Shower. (1min)

Step 7. Thermal Steam Bath. (45 °, 10 min) In a marble filled with clouds of soft mineral-scented steam, a square pyramid of steps faces two golden hives of calcinated fountains rolling with raw hotspring.

Step 8. Thermal Steam Bath. (69 °, 5 min) On the top step of the marble pyramid, closer to the sweet heat.

Step 9. Thermal Full Bath. (36 °, 10min) A long cool pool to stretch warmed muscles and open skin.

Step 10. Thermal Whirlpool Bath. (34 °, 15min) Smaller, bubblier, cooler, a massage by tiny naiads.

Step 11. Thermal Kinotherapeutic Bath. (28 °, 5min) At the center of the bath, like a crown glowing 17 meters above the pool, is a golden frescoed dome that draws your eyes up marble columns and gilded alcoves, tucking the last of your words away, while you float in mineral broth.

Step 12. Shower. (3min)

Step 13. Cold-water Bath. (18 °) A quick (breath-stealingly quick) submersion in cold (breath-stealingly cold) water. Toes numb and skin very awake after.

(Clever mathematicians will have noticed that this does not yet fill the quota of devotional hours. At this point, the supplicant is allowed, in a near-sleeping-kitten-like quiecience, to roam freely through the Temple revisiting her favorite rooms at leisure for several REM cycles.)

Step 14. Drying Off. (with warm towels). (4min) Bed-sheet-sized warmed towels.

Step 15. Application of Moisturizing Cream. (8min) Expertly applied in handfuls til you are evenly frosted with a dense fragrant cream; it's not meant to soak in yet.

Step 16. Resting Room. (30min) In which you are rolled into warm blankets and tucked into one of maybe 3 dozen beds filling a huge, dim, rose-colored dome of a room, to nap.

Step 17. Reading Room (30min) In which the lounging continues in a more sentient vein, with time to more fully comprehend the miles one's life has just traveled towards true happiness, and have tea.

I will admit; I remember the practicals, but after step 5, my sense of analytical self, and a goodly portion of my vocabulary, washed down the drain with the suds. (They were good practicals, though: soft cotton sheets to wind in while lounging and traversing, traded for clean sitting pads before the steam room; a dozen pairs of bath sandals in different sizes, and disinfectant-dunk, before the hot rooms; clocks without numbers to help you keep the time without worrying you about time...) The further I wandered into the bathing temple, the deeper I sank into pure corporeal awareness, and solid visceral bliss. The light was always muted and murmuring, the air a burned-velvet pattern of steam and refraction. Every room was decorated with unique painted tiles and mosaics of art nouveau flora, aquatic fauna, or abstract color. The giggle of falling, splashing, running water echoed everywhere. The air never warm and never still, the other bathers never close or stiff, and the staff singularly kind and cognizant of the beautiful healing collapse prompted by the place.

There is a Mark Twain quote cited in every single description anywhere of Baden-Baden's historic Irish-Roman Bathing Temple, and I would probably have my travelog licence revoked if I didn't repeat it for you here, “At Friedrichsbad, you lose track of time within 10 minutes and track of the world within 20…” And as much as I hate to ride even the wittiest of coattails, I agree – if you are someone who pays a lot of attention to your watch, I expect Friedrichsbad is very much like that. For me, though, I'll say Friedrichsbad glows at the sunny crossroads between the Brigadoon of my bones and the Oz of my bliss, and leave it at that.

Friedrichsbad: Historic Bathing Temple 

Thermae #1: Liquidrom

Liquidrom is a rare bathhouse; newly arrived but singing with quality, totally modern with a great deal of soul. It definitely caters to a contemporary crowd – multigenerational but skewed towards the professional – the folks you'd see at a swank club or an artsy cirques review. (That crown topping the building in the photo? That's the Tempodrom on the other side of the building, a swanky big venue.) Liquidrom is outfitted in concrete walls and raw slate floors, but it doesn't ever feel cold or Bloc. The stone lines are graceful, often curved, proportions generous. Iron-caged mysig candles and sculptural flora line the halls, on the walls hang the kind of modern pop art inspired by the circles that inspired mandala-makers. There's soft electronica piped through invisible speakers, vaguely new-age-holiday. Liquidrom knows what it's doing. Liquidrom wants to be cool, and it is cool.

The changing rooms are large and gym-like, if your neighborhood gym goes in for mahogany paneling and shiny black tile. Lockers are secured with a rather complicated key-chip-bracelet, and because this is Germany (home of the Free Body Culture dreaded by Scandinavians) the locker rooms are coed, the bathhouse is coed and largely clothing-discouraged, except for at the bar and in the big pool. Yeah, there's a bar, and a free glass of prosecco the night I visited, and nightly live music, which ranges from jazz to bossa nova to cinematic downbeat. In between sweating and soaking, there are generous resting rooms (indoor and out – where in December you can watch steam curl off your skin) filled with comfortable lounge chairs to cool off and sip whatever.

Lining the minimalist half-wall corridors are nearly a dozen different rooms in which to sweat or soak. 4 different saunas, each a different temperature (from 65 to 90), some featuring aromatic steams or walls of pink Himalayan salt. Each is labeled with bathing information and expectations (wash your seat in the steam room, in the saunas you must have a towel under your butt and feet, etc.) Besides the large pool, there are several soaking pools, each filled with salty thermal water. None reach jacuzzi-heat, but the outdoor pool is warm under the snowflakes, and one pool is so salinated your body floats effortlessly. In between these are cold plunges and huge-headed showers, and passing trays of cold fruit juice and warmed honey for self-massage carried by beautiful waitrons.

The largest pool in Liquidrom is a centerpiece of atmospheric modulation. The ceilings are domed in wide, loomingly post-deco arches; the kind of pool where city elite might swim, deep under Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The salty warm water glows with colored light, refraction patterns ripple over everything. The electronica is piped here too, echoing weirdly off so many curves, but is even more impressively heard Underwater, where the music hollows and billows like whalesong from submarine speakers. So after a hour perusing a plethora of little steams and sweats and soaks, after your senses are relaxed by the wandering of sensorial slowness in a realm of remarkably quiet architecture, imagine lying just covered with warm water somehow holding you afloat, while colored light wafts across your eyelids and shadowy rhythms nod in your ears. When the night's visiting 12-string guitar began picking its silvery way through the waves, my mind joined my muscles in relaxation and I drifted, balanced in a luminous place.

LIQUIDROM: Urban Bathing-Culture