Sylvia's Journal

At 8:30 AM we showed up at the Boston Spa, a full service beauty salon owned by an Ethiopian businessman who made good money in Boston. He traded in his two swanky beauty salons on Newbury Street for this one, plus the resort where we visited last Saturday and another one 500 kilometers further north. A framed Boston Sunday Globe cutting on the wall tells the story of successful Africans returning to their homeland to help the middle class expand, and look good in the process. His own success is allowing others to be successful – this is the trickledown theory. He employs an army of young and gorgeous beauticians, trained at Addis’ Aroma College. The staff-client ration seemed to be 6 to 1.

I started with the hot stone massage while Liz started with a facial. After that we traded places. Hot stone massage was a new experience for both of us. It combines heat, hands, stones and oil. The room was decorated, like the one in Kuriftu resort last week, with rose petals, white towel sculptures and candles on the ground. One nearly set my dress aflame.

The hot stones amplify the pressure of hands and made for a wonderful massage with the heat just on the edge of tolerable. I was surprised the masseuse never dropped the slippery stones; she was clearly very experienced. After I was done she rubbed the oil slick of my body with a hot wet towel, gave me a robe and walked me across the hallway, carrying all my stuff. That was a good thing because I felt all slick and rubbery, hardly able to walk straight and not much of a thinker either. Luckily the distance was short.

The facial room, aside from more petals, candles and sculpted towels, had a tray with various electrical implements that looked much like a dentist tray. I have only once had a facial in my life, a present from Sita and Tessa, some years ago, for Christmas. That was one hour. This one was booked for one and a half hour and I wondered how she could possibly fill all that time. As it turned out it was not just a facial but a delicious head massage, shoulder massage and, once again, a lower leg and foot massage to kill the time while my nutritional mask was drying. All the while a music tape was looping over and over, with muzak made from popular seventies songs and some new age instrumentals.

My face was scrubbed, vacuumed (which sounded like the glob-glob of octopus tentacles getting a hold of my face), something that I imagined to be a sort of a mini cattle prod (not sure what the instrument looked like but it killed the bacteria I was told; if there had been any more volts it would have been a form of torture). I had no idea that my skin needed that much work. But then I learned that we white folks have thin and dry skin that needs much protection; black people have thick and oily skin and Chinese people have very thick and dry skin. She learned that in the Aroma Academy and had to take special classes to be able to treat the foreigners. My fragile white skin required five layers of lotions and creams: tonic, dry skin cream, some other cream, sun screen, and after sun screen. The cosmetic industry has a good thing going for itself.

With a last pat on my cheeks and forehead she ended the session, brought me a sugarless lemon juice and left me quietly to return to the world. Liz emerged a little later, also looking a little dazed, and enchanted with her hot stone masseur. We walked upstairs in slow motion and enjoyed a very leisurely lunch, mezze and quiche, our last macchiato and a pizza-to-go for our pre-flight dinner. The taxi driver who took us back to the hotel had a picture of Obama glued to his dashboard – he was just as happy with our new president as we were.

We spent the rest of our time in Ethiopia cleaning the oil from our skin and hair, packing, doing our expense reports and catching up on the news that happened while we were otherwise engaged. And now onwards to Amsterdam.