The Spa

There's this spa that Gina introduced me to years ago when I first visited Shanghai. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like it in the rest of the city and possibly the rest of the world. I shared the spa with Peter soon after we moved here and we have subsequently exposed all our foreign friends to Xiao Nan Guo (Little South Land). Photos are strictly forbidden, but our friend George, who is moving back to the States at the end of the month and figured he'd risk deportation, was able to snap a few photos on our last visit. Now that our spa experience has been made public, I can share the details of it with you.

The trip begins with a long metro ride followed by a ten minute cab ride. The spa is so big it could easily be mistaken for a hotel. It's five floors of fun, but when you enter the lobby and exchange your shoes for a pair of rubber flip flops, there's no way you can know what you're getting into. You're then led to a locker room (men are separated from women at this point) where you strip down to nothing except your flip flops and enter the bathhouse.

The bathhouse portion of the experience involves a leisurely shower where you can brush your teeth and shave your legs at either sitting or standing shower stations. Once you're sufficiently clean you have your choice of soaking pools in a range of temperatures. Some have milk, some have tea, some have jets, and some are exactly your body temperature and perfectly still and make you feel like you have truly left your body. There's a steam room and a dry sauna with a TV playing Chinese soap operas. When you've soaked long enough you can sign up for a body scrub, which the Chinese take very seriously and while it borders on being painful having a mean Chinese woman take a brillo pad to your naked body, you will emerge red-skinned and purified having shed an entire layer of skin that had protected you from weeks of being sprayed with diesel exhaust and coal dust.

We usually spend an hour and a half in the bath and first-timers are very impressed thinking that the bath was a great experience and well worth the seven dollar entrance fee. But once they are toweled off by the changing room attendants and handed their Hawaiian-print muumuu and paper panties, they have a sinking feeling that it's not over yet. It's time to take in a show. Upstairs there's a huge auditorium with a stage surrounded by cushy recliners. You can pick your teeth, clean your ears, and drink a beer while young Chinese boys perform acrobatic and contortionist feats. Eventually a troupe of Russian girls in skimpy outfits entertains with an array of dance numbers and costumes. It's not Las Vegas, but the girls are endearing in their poor dance skills and you have to hand it to them for coming all the way to China to perform in such a venue (one wonders what promises were made when they left Mother Russia).

When the show is over you can join the rest of the floral-clad Chinese in any number of diversions. Play mahjong, watch TV, eat dumplings, work out, get a massage or a haircut or your eyebrows waxed, play ping pong, sleep--the possibilities are endless. We usually hit up the TV room, filled with recliners with personal flat screen TVs. We watch several different Chinese shows at once, drink beer, get our feet rubbed, eat peanuts, and chat. For an extra three dollars you can spend the night. We haven't opted for the slumber party yet, but it is always tempting when we have to get back into our street clothes, pay our tab, and get in a dirty Shanghai cab for the long late-night ride home.

I know there's nothing like this in the States...at least not for seven bucks and not with dancing Russian girls. Xiao Nan Guo is definitely on our list of things we will really miss about China. Here's the boys, Rasmus (Denmark), Peter, Andrjez (Latvia), and George (Arkansas), in their matching PJs.