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Partly because I'm in a good place. Balanced in dynamic emotion. Eager for movement, content in my position. Full to the brim of new ideas, feelings, plans, wants. Looking forward to what will grab me, when I reach out my hands.

Partly because I don't really know what I look like these days. Content-driven, food-motivated, high-verbal, overactive imagination. Highly experienced, building new skills, stretching boundaries, embodying new comfort zones. Compassionate confrontation, emergence, sanctuary. And I'd like to see it all laid out, playing out, in front of me.

Mostly because I want to connect, and this is one way I know how to open.

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 

So Bath They Named It Twice

Baden-Baden is built on magic, has celebrated several millenia of birthdays spinning, winding and handing out this magic, and is completely conscious of it. You can be sure, though I have found no mention in our post-Imperial literature, that people of all fur, feathers, and feet have been bathing in the springs of this valley since the beginning of the world. It's too beautiful, too protected, altogether too perfect to have not threaded its magic into all organic history. The Romans made it official with stone, however, and Baden-Baden has been in the business of bathing ever since. I wandered over some of its 54 sq. miles of Black Forest river valley, through falling snows and along the river Oos, in a kind of steamy trance. An Entire City Devoted to Bathing.  

And casinos. 

But who cares about casinos?

I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, but I'm a sucker for bathhouse t-shirts. I don't really understand it either, and it's not like most bathhouses sell t-shirts (but the ones that do are awesome!) It might be some bath-geek equivalent of sport team support. Or maybe it's just poorly translated enthusiasm. I don't usually wear clothes with logos, or words. I don't often wear band t-shirts. They make me feel shy and unprepared for coolness. But somehow I'm totally charmed by the thought of someone designing a t-shirt to talk up a place filled with hot water and naked people. I think it's fabulous. And wearing them makes me feel like an underground superhero.

So I keep my eye out for bathhouse paraphernalia. And on my last day in Baden-Baden I found myself in a situation I had never encountered before – desirous of a "I ♥ Baden-Baden" t-shirt. You know exactly the one I'm thinking of, it's the same shirt hanging in every eye-rollingly touristy souvenir shop on the planet. (My only defense is that I do have an awful lot of enthusiasm, even if it is poorly translated.) I looked high and low, everywhere from the shops where they sell postcards to the train station newsstand to the Christmas market to the supermarket. I found silver-plated Baden-Baden spoons, and enamel-painted Baden-Baden plates, and even swarovski-crystal-bedazzled Baden-Baden totebags. After going through a dozen bewildered shopkeepers in a dozen different shops, I am forced to concede that Baden-Baden, city of historically relevant baths and big old money, is simply not mundane enough to make tacky tourist t-shirts. 

And, for the life of me, I don't know whether to be annoyed or relieved.

Wasa: We're Doing It Wrong!

My friends, I've made a discovery. I have realized the errors of my ways and am humbled before Foodstuffs. It was an honest mistake, though possibly shameful that I have persisted in it for 3 decades. I was misguided, or perhaps unguided.. Left to my own devices in pantries and grocery coop aisles, I admit, I thought they were simply Bad Crackers.

Crackers the culinary equivalent of particleboard; too fibrous for fun, too dry to be interesting, and always (I thought) subtly threatening to leave splinters in my soft palate. Overpowering in their sheer granular density to all but the sharpest of cheddars, insufferably hard even with soup, and requiring way, way too much chewing . No matter which flavor I tried – from the burnt sienna rye to that weird wafer stuff, the multigrain rainbow in between – I just couldn't like them. Maybe, if you were “raised by hippies,” like I was (that's not a slight, Mom & Dad, it's just a cultural signifier – you were feeding us tofu and dressing us in veleur for too long to deny it, and I love you for it), or if you've ever (like me) grocery shopped with only change in your pockets, or (like me) have more sense of adventure than good sense, you've had similar collisions with Wasa. And lived with the regret.

But friends, as I stand before you today (sit on a hostel bed typing from several thousand miles away), I can assure you; We Just Got It All Wrong. Wasa isn't the enemy. We weren't even making bad choices, we just weren't operating the cracker correctly! I have seen the true and benevolent face of Wasa, and I can share with you the secret: They're For Breakfast!

Listen, this changes everything. Wasa is quite possibly the road to morning-eating success for anyone (like me) who simply cannot deal with waking up to clingy, doughy, sweet food. Wasa is a clean, near-neutral canvas upon which to paint your most delicious breakfast dreams (near-neutrality is key, there's truly no point in eating beige). Particularly well-suited to the savory breakfast (as all reasonable and benevolent foodstuffs ought to be), Wasa's deep grain flavors provide the kinds of bass notes often missing in early-morning meals. These are the foundation for fantasy open-faced sandwiches, for breakfast! They are made Hard On Purpose, so they can be piled high with any/all your favorite cheeses/meats/vegetables/dairy-based semi-solids, becoming a veritable Edible Plate. (Which is good, because for those of us with morning-impaired manual dexterity, forks and knives are an unnecessary danger.) (Also, seriously, Pile Up. One swipe of cream cheese means nothing to Wasa. These things can still taste like performance-art food if you don't show some ambition.) They are made Indefatigably Crunchy a) so even if you do apply a solid inch of semi-solid dairy-things, you still get to chew something and b) because contrasting food texture is neat. Texture wakes up your mouth. And those splinters, they aren't endangering your gums, they're optimizing your dental hygiene routine like the little cleaner-fish that hang out in the mouths of resting sharks.

Breakfast revolution and shark similes. Let the healing begin!

Some Baths That Aren't Yet

Most of the baths I've visited have had historic precident, gracing their cities as original facilities if they were not actual founding reasons for putting a bit of civilization a particular where. When new baths come along, they are made from equal parts inspiration and obsession. Some borrow from history and culture, some forge ahead, but all are intentionally reinvesting in bathing.

Berlin's once-and-future Stadtbad Oderberger  thrives during renovation as a venue for concerts, conferences and locally-made craft markets.

Kultuurisauna is being built as part of Helsinki's year of recognition as a World Design Capitol, with goals of sustainable design and materials-use, and intentional revitalization of sauna culture.

Some Baths That Aren't Anymore

Searching out venerable thermae, traditional neighbohood saunas, and the brand-new soaking spots, the word for Bath is the first I'm learning when I enter a new country. My eyes and ears are constantly casually scanning for signs of bathing. Probably I imagine baths more often than they exist (though honestly, what else is going on in a backyard shed with a chimney?), but I've been impressed that almost every Scandinavian town has a Sauna-something Street, and at how many Germanic placenames end with -Bad.

So there are many places I come across where I don't bathe, where nobody bathes anymore; but maybe there's a commemorative plaque, or an epithet in stone, or a bit of historical mention in a travel book.

The People's Bathhouse on Oderberger Strasse, in Berlin. A once-and-future-bathhouse, long neglected but being restored...

In Tallinn's Old Town there is still a Sauna St, and a historical stop in their self-guided walking tour.

One of the original spring sites in a cliff embedded in Baden-Baden.

Under the Friedrichsbad Bathing Temple in Baden-Baden is the ruins of a Roman soldier's bathhouse, locked safely away all winter long.

Land Is Land

One thing I've noticed, traveling around this planet of our as much as I've been able, is that everywhere I go, the landscape is home. Surely, different parts of the world wear different colors, and sometimes the shapes and scale are unique and surprising. There is always something new to see, around the corner, if you are curious enough. But the land is brown and green. The sky is blue and white. The sun shines yellow and pink. The stars and moon glow silvery against black and purple. Traveling through winter, the land faded to sketch and monochrome, every tree is shadow-brown, all small plants are in their quiet tan pajamas, and everything else is dusty white. I could be skirting Chicagoland, nearing the foothills of the Rockies, crossing upstate New York. But I am racing though Bavarian countryside, and this blizzard could have followed me from Stockholm, or it could be a stranger from Russia. I haven't done much traveling in the winter (some part of me has always been too skeptical to allow for possible frostbite on a lonely train station) until now. I love the spherical intimacy of it, the land in focus only nearby, the colors subtle. From a train, snug and speeding, the familiarity of the landscape has a special magic all its own.

It's only when we cross into the acreage of civilization that shapes begin to look Foreign. The different ways different people use hills, or roofs, or the edge of their claims. The little towns crowded into Black Forest valleys, vertical like a tapestry painted on silk, never minding perspective. Switchback roads and yellow faces and linear yards of crenelated edging, mirroring the pines above and causal river below. Steep tiled roofs in drainage undulation or dragon scale. Tight and idyllic, efficiently antiplanned, like a bird's nest.

And around the bigger cities, where we might have a Fitchburg or an Urban Sacrifice Zone, there are summer gardens. Little plots of land where urbanites, missing nature but unendowed with a summer home, can tend a bit of earth and fly a flag. Which I guess is another kind of sacrifice. The cute crowds of small fenced yards and sheds are always along railroad corridors, so I'm not sure what they garden. Summer memories. Even in winter, they look tidy and happy, some terraced and some wreathed in years of wisteria vines. Miniature national/natural dream colonies. Every bit of land is a door to all of Earth.