If you ever find yourself in Turkey, the #1 experience I would recommend is a Turkish Bath, or Hamam.

Before I Googled to find out what it was, my vision of Turkish Bath was of naked men sitting around in a sauna smoking cigars. (I don’t know where I got that from. The things that live in our heads sometimes….) Boy was I wrong. The only accurate part of that was the naked part. There were no men, no cigars, and very little sitting.

The procedure takes place in a semi-private compartment of a giant marble hall. It starts off with a few minutes of warm-water soaking to open your pores. Then an attendant gives you a very thorough scrubbing with a special mitt. And when I say thorough, I’m not kidding. She scrubs every inch of your body. I was wearing only the thong they provided, and she even got inside that! I had heard that they can get a little rough with the scrubbing and pummeling, so I was worried it would be like going through a power car wash with a meat tenderizer, but it was nothing like that. It was stimulating and recharging.

That’s followed by a silky whole-body clay mask, then a shampoo with Judas tree extract and rinse. Then you get placed on a hot marble slab and they run bubbles across your whole body. The effect is almost like you’re sitting in a hot bubble bath. I don’t know how they get the bubbles on you but it made me laugh. You get a full-body massage, on both sides, with just the right amount of pressure. When she reached out her hand to indicate it was time to get up, I didn’t want to; I could have spent the night on that warm marble slab covered in bubbles.

Finally, you end with a collagen mask, beet juice, and glass of tea. I walked out feeling silky clean and recharged. The friend who invited me to join her for this opted to get an additional hour of massage and we both found the whole thing to be just an exhilerating, pampering experience. If it wasn’t so pricy, I would do it daily. But what a wonderful extravagance. I highly recommend the Ayasofya Hurrem Sultan Hamami, but there are many other hamams all over town.