Hammam:  hommage to the gommage.

I cannot think of a better way to get rid of stress and truly relax than to spend half a day in the hammam at the Mosquée de Paris in the 5^th arrondissement.  The hammam will pamper almost all of your senses: touch, smell, sight and taste. 

First is sight.  Before you even step inside the mosque, the clean white stucco building will make you feel like you are in southern Spain or Morocco.  The green tiles on the ceiling, the archway entrance, the trees in the courtyard, the blue glass—this is an experience and not just a normal spa.  Inside it gets even better.  When you enter the lobby for the spa, look up—the ceiling is exquisite.  The Mosquée was built in the early 1920s in the Byzantium style, so it has high domed ceilings and mosaic decorations.

After you change into your swimsuit and put your belongings in a locker, take your towel, soap, and sponge through the decorative door on the right.  Here you will find a series of steam rooms, each with a high vaulted ceiling painted a faded blue.  The walls and seating areas are brown marble.  

Each room is progressively warmer.  Spend a few minutes in each room relaxing on the marble benches getting acclimated to the heat and humidity.  In the first room, grab a bucket so you can fill it with water later on. 

The third room is the largest and full of people.  This is where you will spend most of your time.  There are blue tiled columns and a center dome.  There are several private places where you can put your towel down, fill your bucket with water and spend an hour or two relaxing and meditating.

Here you can open your packet of savon noire and slowly cover your body with it, periodically splashing water on yourself.  Use your sponge to rub the soap into your skin and lather it up.  It looks like a scene from Greek mythology, full of half-naked women with their hair wrapped in towels, rubbing their own and their friends’ bodies in eucalyptus oil. 

If you are up to the challenge, you can spend some time in the final, and hottest, room.  This room has a small pool in it that is filled with cool water.  And you can find out how good that cool water feels if you can handle the heat.  Ah, what a nice reward.  When you are done with that room, go back to the main room and relax some more in there.  

The next sense is touch.  Wearing a swimsuit to the spa is obligatory, which, to French women, means a bikini bottom only.  But the more skin you expose, the more your skin will thank you. 

After spending a few hours in the spa, the combination of the steam and savon noire (which contains vitamin E) will make your skin soft and open your pores.  Now you are ready for your gommage.  Slowly head back through each room, and then wait in the first room for your gommage (yes, the French people here actually do queue up for it and it did not go unnoticed by them that the Arab patrons did not feel the need to do so).   

What is a gommage?  The most complete cleaning of your life.  You lie down on a table and give the woman (the gommatrice?) your wool sponge.  If you haven’t taken your bikini top off yet, at least take it off for the gommage.  Now you get your full-body scrub and rub.  When I say full body, I’m exaggerating a little—she did not scrub the top of my head (though I suspect that if I were bald, she would have).  First she’ll get your front and then your back.  This harsh, yet refreshing, massage will remove dead skin and leave you feeling incredibly clean and rejuvenated.  Your whole body feels like a newborn baby’s butt.  When your gommage is over, you can head back into the spa to take a shower. 

Smell.  The hammam has a distinctive aroma that comes from the savon noir you rub into your body.  It’s made from olive and eucalyptus oils.  The smell permeates the air as it mixes with the steam.  Even after you get back home, your body, clothes and towel will smell like the hammam. 

And finally, taste.  After your visit to the spa, you can continue to relax in the garden patio with a glass of piping hot mint tea and some Moroccan pastries.  Or, you could go to the mosque’s restaurant and have cous-cous or a tajine before you have your mint tea and pastries. 
 

The hammam offers many pricing options.  You can buy things individually, with a base entry fee of 15 euros.  A packet of black soap, a wool sponge (which you must buy the first time, but you get to keep and bring back for subsequent visits), and a gommage cost an extra 18 euros.  There are several packages that include all that plus a massage, mint tea and a pastry.  The “formule oriental” includes the spa, gommage, massage, lunch in the restaurant and mint tea; an entire day of body and soul pampering for only 58 euros. 

The hammam is easy to find—it’s in the 5^th arrondissement, next to the Jardin des Plantes, on the corner of rue Daubenton and rue Geoffroy St. Hilaire.  It is reserved for women only on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and for men on Tuesday and Sunday.  For more information, visit their website at http://www.la-mosquee.com.