Monday, April 19, 2010

Fish Ate My Feet

After lunch, I had a Thai massage, followed by a foot cleaning at a fish spa. The Thai massage lasted one hour. The spa was a lovely wooden pavilion with private rooms behind sliding panels. My masseuse led me in and handed me a pair of soft cotton pajamas, like hospital scrubs. She left the room for a few minutes so I could change. When she returned, she told me to lie down on the mat on the floor. She climbed onto the mat with me and spent the next hour pulling and stretching my limbs. She used all kinds of crazy leverage to tug on me. She twisted her arms around mine, stuck her elbow in my back and pulled. When she wasn't pulling, she was pushing. Instead of a kneading massage like I am accustomed to, she pushed - or rather - poked. Everything felt stretched out and longer. I came out of there feeling as tall as Travis, our ex-NBA fellow traveler.
From the Thai massage, we went right to the fish spa. It was one of the weirder ten minutes I ever spent in my life. First, the attendant washes your feet with soap in a stone tub and rinses them with water. Then, you climb up onto a banquette and drop your feet into a fish tank at the base of the seat. The fish tank below the banquette looks like an aquarium filled with little fish of about 1 inch in length, swimming about in clear water. As soon as you put your feet into the water, they swarm around and start feeding on the dead skin on your feet. They look like sharks moving in for the kill. It feels like little bites; not painful at all -- just very strange. And, it's even stranger to sit there, looking down at your feet knowing that creatures are gorging themselves on the dead skin hanging on your stinky feet.