A Visit to the Baths at the Gellert Hotel

We went to the baths in the Gellert Hotel. Since Budapest is famous for its curative baths, and this is one of 5 or 6 famous ones, we thought it would be a good first choice, with clear instructions and some translations of signs since it is attached to the 5-star Gellert Hotel. Not so. Everything is in Hungarian, all the staff speak Hungarian proudly as their only language and there are no signs or instructions. So, we wandered into the wrong areas and couldn't figure out what we were doing, to the horror of the staff, and our amusement. Ugly Americans again!

Men and women are completely separated. In the women's area, you go into a big steamy locker room with little cubicles with doors set here and there. An attendant gives you an apron and points you to a cubicle (we decided later that I did this wrong and I was supposed to find some stairs and go to another area with lockers, but I just went into a nearby cubicle without a locker.) You take off your clothes and put on this apron. The apron has been designed for women shaped like Russian babushkas, and if you can attach it at all, it modestly covers your belly button and leaves everything else bare.

Then you and your apron go to the showers. The showers are in a steamy room lined with tiny blue tiles from another era. The water is hot and there is lots of water pressure. After showering, I wandered back out of the shower room looking for the steam baths, which is what I bought a ticket for. A friendly old lady who was vaccuuming her hair, which she had rolled tightly onto pink curlers, asked me where I was from in English and sighed happily when I told her I was American. She told me where to find the steam rooms. I went back through the showers to a little unlabelled glass door and opened it to a room full of steam. There were a few wooden chairs and I saw that the women sitting in them had laid their aprons down on the chair seats and sat on top of them. The chairs were really hot. So I steamed myself to a nice tomato-ey soft sodden redness and then moved on to the pools.

The rooms with the pools are also lined in the tiny decorative tiles and filled with steam. The ceilings are 30 or 40 feet high and arched. There are water statues and fountains along the rims of some of the pools. You can go in pools that are a few degrees warmer than body temperature, or a few degrees cooler -- a suprisingly different sensation. There are also some cold plunges, which everyone completely ignored. And a szauna, which is dry heat. Extremely dry. And except for the steam rooms, everything is really old and really grand, and the damages of time are hard to see through all the mist.

It was swoony with its misty, ancient romance. So elegant, so grand.

We read that the baths would be sulfurous and stinky -- the curative minerals -- but these weren't. They didn't have any particular smell at all, as far as I could tell.

When I was ready to go, I went back to the area where I got my apron, and lots of attendants came over to tell me I was doing something wrong. I suppose you aren't supposed to be naked in that area. So I wandered back to the showers and then the pools and followed someone else who was leaving. We went into yet another room, where we exchanged our little aprons for sheets. The other woman dried herself off with her sheet and walked back to the cubicle area, so I dried myself off with my sheet and returned to the disturbed attendants. They let me back into my cube and all was well! All in all, a marvelous experience.