Catherine Price Read Free

visitors the chance to soak their cares away in bathtubs full of their favorite beverage. Complete with warm mineral water and a “distinct beer foam of a caramel color,” the brewery’s special dark bathing beer contains active beer yeast, hops, and a mixture of crushed herbs. But the fun doesn’t end with the bath: afterward, guests are led to a relaxation area where they are wrapped in a blanket in a dim room with pleasant music and given one of several complimentary drinks.
    “The procedures have curative effects on the complexion and hair, relieve muscle tension, warm up joints, and support immune system of the organism,” says Dr. Roman Vokaty, the spa’s official balneologist, in response to the obvious question of why a beer bath is a good idea. One could argue that the combination of a post-bath massage and the bottles of Chodovar’s lager consumed while the organism soaks in the tub might have just as much, if not more, of an impact on the organism’s well-being than the beer’s carbon dioxide and ale yeasts. But then, I’m not a balneologist.
    If you like the idea of wasting a perfectly good drink, check out some of Europe’s other beer spas: Starkenberg in Austria, for example, has been known to fill an entire swimming pool with Pilsner, and the Landhotel Moorhof in Franking, Austria, offers a brewski facial made from ground hops, malt, honey, and cream cheese. According to one survivor, it “smells remarkably like breakfast.”

Chapter 7 An Overnight Train in China on the First Day of Your First Period
    J une 16, 1991, was Father’s Day. It was also the day I got my period for the first time, and it occurred right in the middle of a family vacation to China—a three-week self-guided journey with my parents and my mom’s seventy-year-old friend, Betty.
    I was mortified. To make things worse, the hotel we were in didn’t have sanitary supplies, and in China at the time it was difficult to find a store opened to foreigners at all, let alone one with Western toiletries. Had we been in America, the next step would have been for us to go to a drugstore together where I, too embarrassed to pick out sanitary products myself, would inspect the toothbrush display as my mother yelled questions from the next row over like “Scented or non-scented?” and “Do you want wings?” Instead, my mother convinced me to allow her to tell Betty; the two conferred in hushed tones, and when back in my room, Betty rummaged through her toiletry bag and presented me with a Depends.
    Wearing an adult diaper as a twelve-year-old added insult to the injury of menstruation, and our itinerary only made things worse. Presumably if we’d been sticking around at our hotel, we would have been able to find maxi-pads somewhere in the city before Betty’s supplies ran out. However, my parents, eager for an authentic, self-guided China experience, had arranged for us to get on a train to a city twenty-three hours away. No sooner had we left for the station than my body, unsatisfied with the humor of me simply menstruating on a Chinese train, broke out in hives. My mother gave me two extra-strength Benadryl. I stumbled to the train platform with my parents and woke up three hours later on an upper bunk in a moving train, in a car with vomit stains on the carpet and circles at the end of each bed where people’s heads had wiped away the dirt. My parents and Betty were giggling on the bunks below me as they played bridge and drank “tea” they’d brewed from water and Johnny Walker Black. I needed to use the bathroom.
    I slid off the top bunk and unlatched the door to our cabin to find the toilet, but my mother stopped me before I could leave.
    “It’s clogged,” she said. “Betty and I tried to use it, and it smells so bad, we almost threw up.”
    “What am I supposed to do?”
    “Do what we did,” said my mother, which was greeted by tipsy laughter from Betty and my father. “Pee in this.”
    My mother then handed me a