escort diary® of Jolie: My favourite place on earth right now
I found a bathhouse, and it has become my favourite place to go fast.
I went for the first time on a weekday afternoon, alone, which is the only way to arrive at a place like this. You need to walk in without a conversation to maintain and without anyone else’s comfort to manage. You need to be available to the building itself, because the building has something to say.
The first thing I noticed was the stone. Not decorative stone, not a marble veneer someone selected from a catalogue and glued to a plasterboard wall, but actual stone, left in its weight, holding up pillars that rise directly from the water. Concrete left as concrete, aw materials allowed to remain raw, holes and metal beams.
There are two magnesium baths, both hot enough that you feel your pulse arrive in places you had forgotten had a pulse: your wrists, your temples, the backs of your knees. After twenty minutes in that water, the distance between what you are thinking and what you are feeling closes to almost nothing, the inner monologue gets quieter. Not because you have been told to relax or because someone is playing rainforest sounds at you from a speaker, but because the heat itself is doing the work, and heat, unlike meditation apps, does not require your cooperation.
Then there is the cold plunge. I will not lie to you, the cold plunge is not pleasant (unless you enjoy shocking your system... which I do). It is supposed to be a small confrontation with your own willingness to stay in something uncomfortable, and if you think that sounds like a metaphor for most of what I write about in this diary, you would be correct. You lower yourself in, the water is so cold that your body sends a very clear, very articulate message to your brain that says: get out. And you stay, not long, maybe ninety seconds, but the staying is the point. Afterwards, you feel like you have been rinsed from the inside, which is not a feeling you knew you needed until you have it.
The sauna is good and does what a sauna does and I will not waste your afternoon describing it, because the real thing I want to talk about is the hammam.
If you have never been in a hammam, what I am about to say will sound like an exaggeration, but it is not: a hammam is one of the last remaining public spaces in the Western world where people are genuinely equal. Not theoretically equal, not legally equal, actually equal. Everyone is in the steam, no one has clothes that signify anything, no one has a job title or a watch or a car parked outside that says something about what they have managed to accumulate. You are a body in foggy heat, sitting next to another body in heat, and either you can tolerate that mutual exposure or you cannot. Most people, it turns out, can. Most people are much better at being simply present than the rest of their lives allows them to practice.
The hammam tradition is North African, Ottoman, ancient. The French know it well, we inherited it through Algeria, through Morocco, through Tunisia, and it has always meant something slightly different from the Finnish sauna or the Japanese onsen, although they are all, in their way, answers to the same question: what do we do with the body when we are not using it for labour? The hammam’s answer has always been: we attend to it, together, in steam.
You don't understand how many years I spent wondering why Australia is obsessed with saunas and so few hammams exist, and now I have one that offers scrubs on the side.
And then, and this is the thing that made me fall in love with this place, there are chess boards... in the hot bath. Stone boards set into the edge of the pool so that you can sit in forty-degree water and play a game that requires your sharpest cognition while your body is in the most surrendered state available to it outside of sleep. I cannot tell you how much this single design decision reveals about the people who built this place. They understood that the mind and the body are not in competition, that intellectual intensity and physical dissolution are not opposites but companions, that you can lose a bishop while your shoulders finally release a tension you have been carrying since Tuesday, and that both of those things - the loss of the bishop and the release of the tension - are happening in the same moment, to the same person, and neither one is asking the other to wait.
I play chess alright. I am not a grandmaster by any means, and I seem to enjoy sacrificing pieces for the sake of it. But the losing matters less when you are sitting in magnesium water with steam curling off the surface and a stranger across from you who is also losing, or winning, or simply thinking about their next move with the same quiet focus that the water has made possible. There is a particular quality of attention that emerges when two people are doing something difficult together in a state of physical ease. I think it might be what trust looks like before language gets involved.
They serve you tea, not from a machine, not in a paper cup, not with a QR code for a menu. From a person, in a ceramic glazed cup, left on a stone counter with fresh water and three different herbal teas to choose from. If you have been in my home already, you know how sincerely I love my tea and how much this would matter to me.
I go to the bathhouse alone. I bring a book and the intention of using every minute of the allocated time. I move through the spaces in whatever order feels right: hot, cold, steam, hot again, tea, chess if someone is there, silence if no one is. I do not optimise it, I simply stay until the staying feels complete, which is a sensation I cannot describe but which you would recognise immediately if you felt it.
I have lived in Sydney for ten years and I have loved this city in many specific ways: the light on the harbour, the birds on my balcony, the particular quality of a Thursday evening in Surry Hills when the week has softened and the restaurants start filling and the air smells like someone is cooking meat. But this bathhouse has given me something the city had not yet offered, which is a reason to be still... not productive, not interesting, not performing anything for anyone. Just warm, and quiet, and present in a body that, for once, is not being asked to do anything except exist.
If you have been running at the pace that most people run at, which is the pace that makes you feel like you are always behind, I would like to suggest, gently, because I am not in the business of telling people how to live, that hot water, cold water, steam, chess, tea, and stone might be worth an afternoon.
You might find that you needed it more than you thought.
J x
