First Stop...Hungarian Baths

This is the magical place I spent my Friday night

My one evening in Budapest was fantastic.  I had previously booked a massage at one of the bath houses in the city, but I couldn’t find their desk.  Since I hadn’t paid anyone money, I decided to take up a nice Australian on his pitch for his company’s spa services.

Boy was it a great decision!

They have an entire floor dedicated to relaxation and quiet with a DELICIOUS ginger, lemon, and thyme tea.  Admittedly, I had a little difficulty adjusting to using my quiet voice, instead of my normal boisterous laugh.  

Indoors

The experience started with a half hour work out (I thought they were crazy).  However, it makes some sense.  The baths are so warm, that going into the water with cold muscles decreases the time you can enjoy sitting in them.  If you’re already warmed up a bit, the baths and saunas seem warm, not hot.  A Hungarian personal trainer who learned English from watching movies and stuff led me through some basic strength training exercises.  He seemed a bit surprised when I asked for more weight and could do the moves fairly well.

What really sold me on this company was the tour of the baths.  There are probably twenty different pools and saunas throughout the building and I had NO idea what the Hungarian signs said.  The tour guide was really helpful and made the time periods for different temperatures easy to remember.  Above body temperature-20 minutes; at body temperature-40 minutes; and below body temperature-just a few minutes.

So, then it was time for me to experience the wonderful mineral baths.  I started out good, a few warms baths, a “neutral” one.  Then I tried to be adventurous and went into a sauna.  They’re HOT!  I remembered the tour guide telling me about a steam room so I wanted to try that too.  The sign on the door said 70 degrees, so I was like perfect!  Not too hot, the perfect summer day. 

I almost died.

Somewhere between the 38 degree warm bath and the 70 degree BOILING hot steam room, I forgot that temperatures were in Celsius.   Whoops.   Cue inability to breathe and death by skin boiling.

Outside at night

The rest of the evening was pretty uneventful.  I swam in the warmest (45 degree) and coldest (18 degree) pools.  I got a massage.  Oh yah, and swam outside even though there’s snow on the ground.  It was pretty fun to attempt navigating through the steamy baths, because at some points the steam was so thick, you felt like the only one in the pool!

The mineral baths are seriously awesome.  It’s an incredible feat of nature in my opinion to be freezing in your bathing suit running down a flight of stairs outside on minute and the next submerged in a pleasantly warm natural body of water.