Ethnic Cleansing

To what extent washing your hands and taking a bath is good for you has really been a topic for a debate for several thousand years. Before industrialisation, the Christmas Bath was a tradition in a Sweden not particularly bothered by hygiene. Now on the other hand, we seem to have gone a bit too far with many people taking showers several times a day.

For the second year in a row, my mother and I spent a whole day between Christmas and New Year's Eve at a spa. Since I like spas a lot, I have been to many of them, especially the ones close to Gothenburg: Arken, Hagabadet, Stenungsbaden, Varbergs Kusthotell, and Vann.

From Varberg 2012

My favourite is Sankt Jörgen Park Resort and Mum likes it too. Very close, good raw food for lunch, excellent massage, nice products, and many different corners to hang out in: the teahouse, the sway shelf, the MuViCure room, the saunas, the rainforest showers, the indoor and outdoor pool and much more.

I've also been to many Roman spa towns such as Saltzburg in 1978 as part of a concert tour with the school orchestra, Bath on my first trip alone to England in 1982, Trier in 1988 as a stop on my journey from Gothenburg to Alicante, Cologne in 1993 on my way back from a ski trip to the Alps, Istanbul in 1999 where I got stuck in the bazaar and never made it to the hammam, Pompeii in 2001 where you were not allowed to use the baths since they were clogged with ashes, Zürich in 2001 where I said no thank you to a job at a international software company, Budapest in 2013 where it took us 45 minutes in a hot pool to figure out that the sign probably said you should spend no more than five in it, and Tbilisi in 2015 where I had a good soak in the tub in my hotelroom.

From Budapest 2013

I've also been to Jerusalem in 2010 where Pontius Pilate washed his hands of Jesus. Maybe the present unnecessary use of hand sanitizer is a sign that we have a lot we wish to rid ourselves from.