Learnings from My Salt Spa Experience

Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@lorena-martinez-1218850

In Switzerland—or, at least, in the Lausanne and Geneva areas—a service invites companies to put together offers that it then promotes to people who’ve registered to receive deals. (Like—exactly like—Groupon in the United States.)

The deals come through via e-mail. See an offer you like? You buy it through the club. Then, once you get your voucher for the deal, you schedule your service or activity or experience within a given time window at a time that works for all parties.

All this to say that, late one summer not long after we moved to Switzerland, I saw an offer come through the club for a “salt spa experience” and suggested to Arnaud that we try it.

See, in general, I believe strongly in trying new things. You won’t catch me bungee jumping or clubbing baby seals, of course. But if said new thing only gives me light flop sweat or only slightly repels me, I’ll often give it a go.

Like frog legs, as some readers may remember:

New, yes. Extreme? No.

As I had only recently moved to a new place—a new country, even—I didn’t know yet what things normal people do here and what even normal people here consider abnormal. Does a salt spa fit into the former or the latter category? How was I to know?

If the former, I would have had a cultural experience. Go me! If the latter, I could call myself a pioneer. An “early adopter.”

I figured, though, that I had a good chance that a salt-spa experience would drop into the former category: “something the Europeans do.”

After all, they really like baths in Europe, you see. They have public baths everywhere. People go to these public baths to spend a weekend for relaxation or therapy or what-have you. In fact, the Europeans have done this public-bath thing for a long time. You read Victorian novels and they talk about going to take the waters or take the air or whatever? They mean going to public baths. The ancient Romans? Big public bathers. (I don’t make this up, people. The entire town of Bath, in England, gets its name for its public baths. It had quite the vogue in Victorian England and Roman antiquity.)

And though Arnaud may have told me that he hadn’t done a salt-spa experience in his past, I don’t think he’s exactly representative of the entire European population. He married me, after all.

Regardless, he said he’d give it a go—why not?—so we purchased the vouchers.

And then we had travel and one thing or another weekend after weekend. Finding a free Saturday when we could have a salt spa experience that fit our schedules and the schedule of the salt spa required some advance planning.

I looked forward to it, however. New experience? Check. Something relaxing after a lot of stressful running around for several months? Check. A thirty-minute massage, which we had purchased as an add-on? Check.

Frankly—though I do credit him with going the extra mile here—the spa had essentially strong-armed Arnaud into purchasing the massage add-on. Without it, one and then the other of us would have had to wait half an hour in a wet swimsuit while the other person was locked into a pod for thirty minutes.

Yeah, I should probably explain what the salt-spa experience involved.

First, the spa had recreated the Dead Sea saltwater-floating experience in a Jacuzzi.

Now, I’ve never visited the Dead Sea, so I can’t exactly say whether the water in the Jacuzzi at the salt spa approximates the water in the actual Dead Sea in Israel, though I’d imagine that, at minimum, the environment around the water looks and sounds vastly different than does a small room in an industrial park with bamboo paper on the walls, a Buddha in the corner, and tinkly music.

You float in the salty Jacuzzi for about an hour.

Then, after an hour of pickling, you rinse off in an adjacent shower. One person goes for a massage (or, if you didn’t add a massage to the experience, he or she marinates in a wet swimsuit on a bench in the bamboo room with the Buddha and the tinkly music) and one person gets encased in a body-sized pod that locks around everything but the head from midneck upward.

The pod exposes the body to hydrotherapy purported to treat everything from stress and soreness to cellulite and extra weight, depending on the program chosen from the electronic keypad above your head. (Why can’t one program do all the things, I wonder? I need all the things.)

After one person finishes the pod experience and the other finishes the massage experience, you swap.

And finally, after all this pickling and steaming and massaging, you have snacks in a small room with salt-encrusted walls and a salted floor. Per the brochure, the salt room snacks help respiratory ailments or help prevent respiratory ailments. Something like that.

And voila! The salt spa experience.

My takeaways:

In this experience, I learned that I still really like massages.

Also, I learned that I can’t ever fully relax, even in floaty water.

Third, I learned that nothing could have properly prepared me for a hydrotherapy pod. True, the experience has especial novelty when you get into the pod guided by someone who can only speak a language you can’t, leaving you zero clue what to expect when she locks you in and vacates the room.

Yet, even if I spoke fluent French at that time, I wouldn’t have known what to ask.

Because let me tell you what happened.

After the woman locked me into the pod, my head resting on a towel on a plastic tab poking out of the device, and after I chose the destressing therapy, as I couldn’t have a therapy that did all the things (even though I needed all the things), the woman pressed a button on the blue digital panel above me and left the room.

The pod radiated a brilliant blue that then began to pulse as it emitted a series of high-pitched beeps and misted my body with warm water that it then proceeded to heat to a temperature at which I felt like my body (though not my head) had been encased into a rainforest—or just Houston.

For approximately ten to fifteen minutes the heat inside the pod climbed and the mist hissed, raising the humidity to previously unknown-to-me heights. At least the beeping had stopped. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that all this oppressive swampiness somehow was melting away my stress from at least the neck down. Maybe it was even making my skin radiant and healthy and wrinkle-free. A woman can hope.

I don’t excel at visualization exercises, though I do think I did reasonably well at them this time. I felt relaxedish. Attempting to float for an hour beforehand in salty water with tinkly music may have helped.

At about the fifteen-minute mark, give or take a few minutes, the beeps returned. The temperature in the pod dropped a bit, providing a modicum of relief and helping with the relaxation part of the program. My body felt like it would have the red flush and steaming plumes of a freshly grilled hot dog if the pod popped open and exposed it to the ambient air.

And then, without warning, the pod blasted the undoubtedly pink soles of my sweltering, tender feet with ice water.

If that woman hadn’t locked me into the pod, I would have leapt up and run away.

Instead, I gasped a nearly lung-exploding amount of air and then held it, my mouth pursed into a tight little O.

Whatever relaxing had occurred prior to the blast of cold water evaporated in the steam of my newfound hysteria. Because the machine then proceeded to blast the tender bottoms of my feet with ice water in a pulsating rhythm.

And just when I had almost capitulated to the torture, having relinquished all hope of reprieve, the pod sounded again. Two beeps in quick succession. The pulsating blasts of freezing water daggered sole-ward stopped.

Okay, I thought. I survived. All good. That sure was something.

I let go of all my held breath.

And then the pod released a vigorous waterfall of ice water from its roof directly onto my crotch.

Lest you assume—as I did—that I’d experience a pulsating waterfall of freezing water to my privates for the next few minutes, on and off again, à la the experience with my feet, think again. Oh no. Instead, the crotch waterfall alternated with pointy jets of ice water shot into my armpits.

Crotch. Armpits. Crotch. Armpits. Crotch. Armpits.

They say people at their wits’ end let them all go with laughter, and I guess they do. I did.

Arnaud later told me that, yes, he could hear me making noise from the other room—but he was enjoying his massage. It didn’t sound life threatening, he told me.

Interestingly, through this experience, I learned that freezing water to the hot armpits feels worse than ice water to the fully heated crotch.

And I absolutely would not have known to ask about any of that.

I’d gone first into the pod experience, so I warned Arnaud about the cold water on my way out. I suggested that he choose another type of hydrotherapy than the one called “relaxing,” which has the opposite effect.

And then I went into my massage, which didn’t involve any freezing water whatsoever or, thankfully, any water of any kind.

Would I have the salt-spa experience again?

I’d do the saltwater floaty thing again. Strangely, as I think of salt as drying—it makes us thirsty and preserves meat, after all—it did seem to moisturize my skin. (Though it didn’t relax me. I still felt like I might drown for a full hour.) I guess the salt in a salt-spa Jacuzzi really does differ from the salt in a kitchen. Whether that makes it actual Dead Sea salt, I reserve judgement. Call me a skeptic.

And I’d do the massage again. I’ll always do a massage again.

The hydrotherapy pod? Yeah. Right.