We left Berlin yesterday for Baden-Baden. If you know me, you know that I especially love hot water and flourishing trees. Baden-Baden has both of these things in plenty and it is our first small-ish town on our tour. Here are some pictures from our morning hike on the edge of Der Schwarzwald–The Black Forest. That’s a sequoia that I’m standing next to.

Just FYI, I do know that I’m overusing the HUJI camera filter. I just love it so much.

And some of the lovely town of Baden-Baden.

Today I went alone to the Frederichbad Roman-Irish baths, built right on top of Roman bath ruins.

This is hardcore luxury bathing at its finest. There is a 17 step procedure to working your way through the baths (with suggested time amounts!) and I love following directions, so I decided to start with this bath first. There are several other bath places in town because of the abundant hot springs.

Mondays are also the days where you only have to be naked with other people who identify as your gender. On some other days, everything is co-ed. In steps 10 and 11, I could have bathed with everyone; I tried it for about 2 minutes, felt really uncomfortable, and ran back to the women’s side. No co-ed naked bathing for me apparently. I had no idea that I’d react that way.

The whole thing ends in a sleeping room where they wrap you like a burrito in a warm towel and tell you to take a nap.

Frederichbad incorporates Roman iconography throughout because of the Roman baths. Here’s a relief of Mithra slaughtering a sacred bull right in the entrance way. Nothing says relaxing bath-time like mystic animal death, am I right?

I will add to this; I’m hoping to get Garett to go to one of the other bath places with me tomorrow.