The Baths Beyond

My older brother nodded toward the Hungarian man working the mulled wine cart, signaling my turn to ask for directions.

“Je-chen-yi Gyo-giff-orr-doo?” I sounded out the words in the direction of the man, silently cursing my family for not teaching me Hungarian. Here we were in Budapest, on a “discovering-our-roots” adventure of sorts, and yet we found ourselves lost at every turn. The winecart man furrowed his dark eyebrows at me, as if I were an interesting beetle specimen.

“Széchenyi Gyógyfürdo?” I repeated, faster.

“Oh! Széchenyi Baths you want? Over there!” he said, pointing to a Hapsburg yellow, castle-sized building behind me. I thanked him, and we plodded our way toward the four Corinthian columns marking the entrance, through the knee-high snow. Traveling Eastern Europe in the middle of January meant we had all the best tourist spots to ourselves—and frostbite as our souvenir.

We found our way confusedly into a small room with four kiddie-sized pools full of Speedo-clad older men. We sunk into the lukewarm water, remarking disingenuously to each other that we could feel the restorative qualities already. We grew bored, switched to a hotter pool, then to a cool one, and back to a hot one. The sulfur-filled air invaded our nostrils, and our fingers pruned.

After a while, I walked to the far side of the room in search of a towel. I tried a few locked doors before opening a portal into another world.

Through the door lay a bright room, with a larger pool. Curious, I walked to the far side of this new room, and sure enough, behind the next door lay another room, with ornately sculpted, round stone baths and saunas. At the far end of that room another door opened into a fourth room, and this repeated itself endlessly.

I found myself running through each room, opening doors exuberantly, as if exploring a brilliant dream, until I found a door that opened into a huge outdoor courtyard, as large as two football stadiums. I remembered my brother in the lackluster first room and ran back to enlighten him with my find.

We returned to the courtyard, in which we discovered three Olympic-sized hot tubs, exploding with fountains and liveliness. Men played chess on floating game-boards, couples splashed each other, and children challenged each other to roll in the snow before giggling their way back to the water. Millions of visitors had discovered those pools before me, but at that moment, the bathhouse felt like a place born of my own imagination as much as from that of its architect.

I found an unusual vortex in the farthest of the three pools. I lay on my back and let the current take me, watching the steam and the laughter float off to a cold outside world that had nothing to do with this one. This journey was less about finding my roots, I thought to myself, and more about learning to accept drifting through the unknown.