So today we went for our massage. The day started off badly, with me waking up to a large buzzing noise in my right ear. It was a mosquito.. they don’t normally bite me, but they seem to be having a feast at the moment. I shot up like a bolt and started to make mad slapping movements in the air. Emily didn’t even stir.
We walked into the spa centre for our arompatherapeuticalisticalmagical-something massage. Now bear in mind here that I’ve never been for a massage before, so this whole thing is new to me. We went upstairs and they told us to enjoy the spa before our massage. At this point we had to split into male / female areas so I was left in the male spa area where a member of staff called Miguel showed me to the locker. I picked up a robe and some funky flip-flops from the locker and went into the spa.
Miguel pointed out the saunas – there were two, one is a “dry sauna” whilst the other just chucks steam in your face. I’d seen similar rooms at the gym before, but this is serious full-on spa style stuff with green tea plus hot and cold towels etc.
I went into the dry sauna – it’s probably got a proper name but I’ll just call it that for now. The air tasted of wood and the temperature was about 3 million degrees. After about 10 minutes I felt like a dried prune so I tried the shower to cool off. A large handle had to be pulled to release the water, which pounded out of the huge plate-sized shower head directly over my head. Now I was cold.
Next I tried the wet sauna. This was a bit like our bathroom at home when Emily is in the shower. Despite my best efforts she insists on keeping the window closed when showering, which results in a huge cloud of steam. Anyhow, after this and some more water torture courtesy of the shower I was ready for our massage. I was sitting in the jacuzzi enjoying some red stuff (it had some posh spa-style name, like “Raspberry Rejuvenator” or something, but I’ll call it red stuff), when Miguel came back to tell me it was time for our massage.
I met up with a lady called Deidre (again, I can’t remember exact stuff here – names especially, it was probably Delina but I seriously can’t remember) who was to be my masseuse (I had to spell-check that) and then Emily appeared with her masseuse in tow. We’d chosen to have our massage together, which turned out to be fairly pointless as you end up staring at the floor most of the time. Anyhow, we entered the room and Deidre asks us to remove all our clothes and get on our respective beds whilst they went out of the room.
“Everything?”, I said to Em. “Oh yeah”, she replied – being the knowledgeable one who’s done this before.
“Blimey, who invented this massage malarkey?! Top man!”, I said, but Em was far from impressed.
We hopped under our towels and they came back in. I’ll confess right here that I truly had no idea what to expect. I had visions of her doing some sort of chopping moves on my back, but it seemed to involve a lot of oil and gentle rubbing. As I stared down at the tiles I felt her “un-knotting” my back, which – after the initial slightly painful “thrust”, felt really nice. I couldn’t really relax though. I had Deidre rubbing oil over me whilst I lay there naked. It didn’t seem right, although I was safe in the knowledge that Em was in the same room and this was sort-of her idea.
I tried to relax… Deidre even told me to relax, but my mind very rarely stops thinking about stuff. I started thinking about how much this massage had cost us, then I broke it down into per minute….the resulting figure made me tense up even more. The robbing dogs! How can they charge that much to have some woman rub oil all over your… Wait, what am I saying? That’s exactly why it costs so much isn’t it? No, wait, I’m getting confused with those “other” massage parlours now..
Relax.. Relax… Must relax.. Now she was moving the towel around, and she was rubbing quite far under that towel too. Not THAT far, just a little more than I would have expected. I’m talking arse cheeks here.
Must relax…must relax.. What the hell is this background music? Panpipes… Bells… Flutes… Who composes these background tunes anyway? It’s a mix between the music you hear in Asda and some cheap CD that only ever seems to be sold in garden centres. I started getting visions of a composer talking to his panpipe player..
“Right, so basically the tune goes… ‘Tooott… Toot-toot-toot-toot …. Toooooooot-toot’, then we repeat that for 20 minutes, then we’ll bring Mike in with some wind-chime noises, bells and the odd bird call. OK?”
But then.. As she waggled my legs about, I started to relax… Actually.. relax.. In fact, I nearly fell asleep. I guess that’s a good thing, even when my knees were being held over my stomach.
At the end I thanked Deidre and Emily thanked.. errr.. Pauline. I was actually feeling much better and went wild with my pigeon Spanish, “Muchos muchos gracious. Muy muchos bien! Buenes dias!”, heck.. It probably made no sense and I doubt I’ve spelt it right here but it sounded great and I was on top of the world. At least, for a moment. Unfortunately, when I re-entered the changing rooms the first thing I saw was the naked arse of a very large, hairy man bending over.
Ugghhh.. I think I tensed up within a milli-second and undid all of Deidre’s good work.