Saving $10 to experience Hungarian culture in its most natural form

By Alyssa Pry

My tank top is around my ankles. I pull my towel tight around me, heat crawling up my neck as a large, burly Hungarian masseur looks at me, a smirk of mild amusement playing on his face. My cheeks flush and my fingernails turn white as I grip onto my towel and bend to pick up my shirt.

I look back up; the masseur motions for me to lay down. I picture my friend in the curtained section next to me and imagine her pink t-shirt turning darker from the damp floor. I remind myself this is an experience. And that the massage only lasts 15 minutes.

I can’t remember whose idea it was to come to these baths, but I know I’m not going to be fessing up to it. Our trip to Budapest seemed to be a never-ending experience in bad judgment—after missing our bus, finding a hostel an hour away from the tourist center, and neglecting to eat breakfast, our group was finding it increasingly difficult to remain positive.

Our first night in Budapest found us stranded at the top of the Citadel, a monument on the highest hill in the city. While it hadn’t been difficult going up, we decided to take a different route to the bottom, which led us down a pitch black, icy, and treacherous trail. The soles of my boots had long been worn down so I spent the next hour and a half clinging to the wobbling rail and the hope that I would make it down with my friends—and body parts—intact. Needless to say, we all decided relaxation was the goal for Saturday and settled on visiting one of Budapest’s popular attractions, the Hungarian Baths.

But right now, I wasn’t relaxed. I was barely dressed, cold, and my hair looked terrible. I never imagined my first massage being like this. I pictured tranquil music, water lilies floating in glass bowls, and plush massage tables. Instead, I was cornered in a curtained-off room with only a folding table.

Now I’m lying face down on the table, and my masseur’s protruding stomach is inches away from my face. I picture the light blond stubble covering his youthful face, and imagine him biting his lower lip in effort as he digs his hands forcefully into my back. The procedure was efficient—five seconds in this place, ten in another, all perfectly rhythmic, although out of sync with my pounding heart.

He rubs his hands into my neck and I try to relax but it hurts. He finds a knot, the tight bundle of nerves now throbbing under his strong thumb. I wince in pain, and he stops.

“OK?” he asks stopping briefly. I look up, surprised that his voice is so calm. He asks me again, pointing to my neck. I nod and he continues until the knot is undone and the spot sore.

From outside the curtain, I hear more voices, all of them in a language I can’t understand. I picture the Hungarian man sitting out in a deck chair with us, waiting for a massage. I wonder if I should have let him go in front of me instead of pushing ahead to be with my friends.

When I planned this trip to Budapest, most people I talked to told me to go to the baths. The guidebooks warned that massages here were considered medical treatments, not luxury spas, and I am guessing little has changed in amenities since since the Roman times when hot thermal springs were discovered at the base of the Buda Hills.

While most of the original baths were destroyed after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the 1960s the Hungarian government built new baths around Budapest, often imitating the ancient Roman architectural style and intricate mosaic wall art. A popular place for an afternoon swim or a therapeutic massage, the baths were used during communism for health improvement, not pampering. Most of the baths have changed to meet the demands of the Western tourists who flock to the baths for the afternoon but are still an important part of Hungarian life.

In an attempt to experience that, my friends and I decided to visit the Lukacs Baths, which, on the map, were located only a few blocks away from the Gellert Baths, the most popular baths in Budapest–and also the most expensive. For entrance and a fifteen minute massage, the Lukacs Baths cost 3800 Hungarian forints ($17) and the Gellert Baths cost around 6800 Hungarian forints ($27).

To save $10, we decided to pass up the famed Gellert Baths, its English speaking attendants, cleanliness, and charm in exchange for a dilapidated bathhouse hidden behind a crumbling cement wall two miles away from any main street or tram stop. After using a combination of charades and exaggerated English, we managed to make our way to the bathhouse and were walking through the slippery hallways in our winter coats and boots. Our group was separated into men’s and women’s locker rooms, where we were confronted by Hungarian culture in its purest form: the naked body.

As soon as my group of friends and I walked shyly in, a parade of women wearing nothing but rubber flip flops pushed past to go to the showers located towards the entrance of the locker room. Further in, a women sat on a bench tying her shoes, her clothes folded neatly next to her. Even the two small children who were waiting for their mother to finish dressing seemed oblivious to the amount of sagging flab and pale and water logged skin that we couldn’t tear our eyes away from. It seemed so natural to them, in the way that tying my shoes while fully dressed seemed natural to me. We quickly found our spots in the line of lockers and averted our eyes as we changed into our suits, stifling embarrassed giggles and blushed cheeks.

“Can you believe this?” My friend Sarah mouthed to me as I fixed the straps on my tank top. I smiled awkwardly and shrugged, unsure of what to say. I felt so juvenile about my embarrassment, and thought about the story I’d have to tell when I went back home.

The longer I stay in Europe, the more prudish I find the U.S. to be. From the billboards of waxed and shining bare butts on the side of buildings to photos of women in slinky lingerie in windows right next to toy stores, there is not a day that goes by in the two months I’ve been in Europe that I don’t imagine the shocked and disgusted reactions of my mid-western raised grandparents if they were to walk past the strip bars and news stands which sell porn magazines next to coloring books. Now, as I struggled to press myself as close to the wall as possible to hide my own body in the locker room of the Lukacs Baths, I felt the weight of American culture resting where a sweater should have been.

When I reached behind me to grab my shoes, my hand brushed against the naked and moist skin of an overweight Hungarian woman. I grabbed my shoes, threw them in the locker, and wrapped my towel around me, before exiting the locker room and waiting for my friends in the hall.

I could think of few instances in America where hanging out completely naked would be considered the norm. Nakedness is almost always associated with sexuality and promiscuity in America; women who breastfeed in public are seen as too open and men who wear speedos are seen as just strange. Even the one known nudist beach in my home state of New Jersey is hidden in the woods, miles of dense forest standing between the highway and this alternative universe. Most Americans feel the need to hide their bodies, our conservative culture wrapped in polyester and cotton.

Europe seems to have a different view of nudity. Freikörperkultur (FKK), in English meaning the Free Body Movement, is a German-based movement which endorses the experience of being naked as a way to connect to nature, without any sexual implications. The movement started in the late 1800s, and spread throughout Europe. The philosophy is that the naked body is another form of nature and nothing to be ashamed of. Obviously a branch of the FKK was meeting in these baths, because I could count maybe ten people, most of them my friends, who were feeling like our FKK membership cards had gotten lost in the mail.

Ten minutes later, my masseur has just pulled down my bathing suit bottom and started massaging my butt. My eyes pop open, any hope of relaxing gone. I can feel every part of me tensing up, but he keeps going, either oblivious to my embarrassment or forging ahead because I’m just another 15 minutes in the long line of people he massages. His thick ruddy hands work their way up and down my spine, but my self-consciousness is getting in the way of my relaxation. He pulls me up into a sitting position and I struggle to hold my towel around my naked chest. He can’t possibly think I’m enjoying this and as the seconds tick by, I count every last one.

He massages my neck and then pulls my arms backward, forcing the towel to gather at my waist. Like a reflex, I wrench my hands away from his grasp and pull the towel around me, goosebumps creating a trail up my arms. He doesn’t say anything, and instead silently waits for me to awkwardly readjust my towel. He rubs his hands down my back a final time before slipping out of the room.

I put my clothes back on and leave. I see my friends clustered together outside the door, and I hurry towards them, anxious to hear if their experience was much different than mine.

“How was it?” I ask, picking up a spare towel and wrapping it around my shoulders.

“Oh my God,” my friend Teresa starts. “I thought I was going to die!” she says, which opens a flurry of similar stories about our brooding male maseuses. We share our experiences and try and laugh the whole thing off, in the end settling for a relaxing dip in the heated pool before heading back to our hostel.

After returning to Prague, I ask a few other people who had gone to Budapest about their own bath experiences.

“Did you get a massage?” I ask, expecting affirmation of my discomfort in the baths.

But no, their masseuses were women who spoke English and lit a candle before they started. I didn’t remember any candles burning at the Lukacs bath, but I remember my face giving off enough heat to light a bonfire.

“You had a man?” Most people asked me. “How embarrassing was that?”

Pretty embarrassing. I may have been a part of the Hungarian culture for a few hours, but I took my American values back outside with me when I put back on my turtleneck and zipped my coat up to my throat.

Related Links:

Budapest Tourism Information

Hungarian Baths Information

Alyssa Pry is a third-year student at New York University studying journalism and sociology. She is from Hewitt, New Jersey.