To Bathe or not to bathe

My boyfriend surprised me by telling me he’d booked us into a day spa for massages as my Valentine’s present. Not only did I think “shit I need to go buy him something better” but was also a little unsure.

My scepticism of massages and any body contact from strangers stems from an experience in Turkey. Everyone had told me that I had to try the traditional Turkish bathing experience so, equipped with our swimmers, me and three other girls I had met on my tour ventured into a Turkish bath house. We were met by a big, extraordinarily hairy man and asked if there were women there to perform the bath, “yes!” he replied with total confidence so in we went and stripped down to the bare minimums.

So there we were laying on the big marble table in a room full of steam when in walks the aforementioned man, dressed only in a small white towel and shoes. I thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t the first to have to experience what happened next and at least I had a little warning. The same can not be said for Abby. He pulled her up and took her over to the side of the room and without any warning poured a whole bucket of cold water on her. The rest of us got the giggles that lasted throughout most of the experience.

The bath then proceeded like this… he scrubbed us with a loufa to get off all the dead skin and said to me “gosh, you’re very dirty,” come on, we were in Turkey! He then soaped us up and slid us up and down a big marble platform, flipping us from front to back, cracking all parts of the body and letting his hands get a little friendly for the 17 year old me’s liking.

All the while I couldn’t stop laughing and I’m sure he thought that we were just as weird as we thought the whole experience was. But the moral/ outcome of the story, I have some issues with strangers touching me in the name of relaxation.

Por que?

So what is it about travelling that draws me to it like an addict to a drug? I think that it’s a mixture of two things, the first being the obvious: when you travel you get to experience and see so many amazing things. From Machu Pichu, to the Pyramids of Giza, The Taj Mahal and the Acropolis, I have seen a lot of the world’s most famous sights and they were mind blowing, there’s a reason that people travel all around the globe to see them.

But it’s the second side of travelling that captures me. When I travel, I’m still me, but a better version. I stop stressing about most things, I relax about what I’m wearing or how my hair looks, I open myself up to making friends, I throw myself in the deep end and let my hair down without the worry of who’s watching and what they’re going to think.

It normally takes me about a week to get into the swing of things but once I morph into my travelling self, it is like I shed an outer skin. I have made some great friends over the years through travelling by just sitting down at a table in a bar or hostel and saying “hi, I’m Eve, do you mind if I sit here?” One of the most nerve racking and exhilarating things that I think anyone does when travelling is attacking the local transport, easy enough in English speaking countries, a little harder when there’s a massive language block but you just do it because that's how it works.

Why I can’t manage to adopt this persona in my everyday life, I’m not sure but I think it has something to do with how small Brisbane is and having lived here all my life, it’s inevitable that I know a lot of people. I’m hoping that one day, when this urge to travel numbs to a dull pain, I will be able to merge my two selves into one and be who I truly am all the time. For now though, I’ll just settle with working my butt off during the year to take off and abandon responsibility for life out of a backpack

The First Hit

My name’s Eve and I am a travel addict. For those of you also afflicted by this or any other addiction, I’m sure that you are consumed by both the good and the bad. The excitement, rush and euphoria that comes when you empty your bank account and get a hit and the low that inevitably follows.

There are not many things I blame my mother for in my life, believing that people tend to make their own destiny, but I am confident that my NEED to travel stems from her. It all started when I was 11. My mum had decided to buy a house in the south west of France to rent out to Australians and was going there for a month to set everything up. Being the little miss that I was back then, I was less than impressed that my mum thought she could just take off and leave me behind like that. I can’t remember what the fight we had had that morning was but I was dragged along to my brother’s basketball game and sat there in a huff for the first half. Let me tell you, the second half was considerably better: she leant over to me and whispered “you know you’re coming with me, right?” And that was it…. The rest is history….

That trip turned out to be one of my best. Being the second youngest of 5 children, it was a real commodity to be an only child for a month.

Mum and I caught to train from Paris to Cahors and got straight to business. We proceeded to settle a house, buy furniture and move it all in ourselves, buy produce at the local markets and make friends in the village all with our limited knowledge of French. Actually limited is probably too kind, mum had JE VOUDRAIS FROMAGE down pact but was a subscriber to “if they don’t understand me I’ll just talk LOUDER” school of language.

The month passed far too quickly for my liking with people from all walks of life stopping in to help make the house inhabitable. And so it was time to head back to Brisbane, the trip was over, but not for long…. I had had my first hit and like any addict, I was hooked.