Sunday, October 24, 2010

Massages

Today I had a two-hour massage. Before I moved to Hong Kong, I always thought there were certain ... connotations to being massaged in a darkened room by somebody you've never met before.

You would be swiftly disabused of any such notion if you had a Hong Kong massage. Unless you find an erotic quality in somebody trying to pull your arms off like you were a helpless insect. For a good ten minutes, it felt like my masseuse was attempting to scrape my calves off my legs with the leading edge of her forearm. This feeling only abated when she started grinding her knuckles between various parts of my spine.

All this time, I'm face down on a massage table. Although there's a hole for me to put my face in, either it was designed with a different shape of head in mind, or the designer didn't care much for people having massages. Whichever it was, after about fifteen minutes the pressure of a woman pressing hard on my body seems to be transmitted to the table solely through my eyebrows. I shouldn't complain; sometimes, if I put my head at the wrong angle, I get the full weight of a small woman pushing against my eyeballs. Via the back of my head.

I'd like to think that the outcome of all this pain would be some adrenaline-based euphoria, but that never seems to arrive. I'm just lying there in unimaginable pain as bits of my back get squashed or crushed. As I'm face down, I can't figure out exactly what is going on, but at some point there usually seems to be somebody clambering onto the table so they can sit on me.

And I'm paying for this. Still, on the positive side, afterwards I could move my neck, which may not sound impressive, but a night with my head at an awkward angle, and some overzealous air conditioning, was making me shamble everywhere sideways.

But still, couldn't they go a bit gentler? It's not like my forefathers sold their forefathers opium, or shelled their cities if they tried to stop buying opium, or ...

Oh.

Ok. I'll just shut up and carry on having somebody exploring the elastic limit of my ligaments.

1 comments:

Minnie Bus said...

No pain no gain. Or in this case, no pain, no ability to turn your head. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

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