Bathe Me

To be perfectly honest, I'm exhausted.  Work is in full swing, I've been spending lots of time with my friends and I'm trying to take advantage of every last second of summer.  I'm spent.  Weary.  I need some TLC.  All that I can think of is easing my tired bones into Aire Ancient Baths, a subterranean cavern of marble, water and relaxation in Tribeca.  I've never really done the public bath thing - I think I mistakenly assumed that it was a little...seedy.  I was way off.  It looks to be deliciously decadent.

At the end of the 5th century B.C., the upper classes of ancient Rome attended the magnificent bath houses to enjoy the pleasures of a public bath.  The bathing ritual began in the "Tepidarium," the warm-water pool, then went on to the "Caldarium," the hot-water pool or the high-temperature steam room "Lanconicum," and lastly to the "Frigidarium," the cold-water pool.  This ritual was repeated three or four times.  Immediately afterward, the "tracatores" or masseurs stretched the muscles of the guests who finished their experience with the "unctores" who anointed them with fragrant oils.  

After scouring the website, it looks like Aire is everything that you would want in a palatial stone grotto and offers a pretty awesome version of the ancient Roman bathhouses.  You have 90 minutes to lounge and dip yourself into a series of salt, ice, mineral and jacuzzi baths that surround a glass house of hot steam and stone (aka the sauna).  Then after all of that hard work, you can enjoy a scented oil massage for up to 60 minutes with...(this is the kicker) either two or four hands.  Yes, folks, you can have two people oiling and rubbing your body for a full hour.  Um...sign me up.  

If all of that wasn't enough, Aire offers various private rooms where you and your date bathe in red wine, champagne or olive oil for 30 minutes, enjoy a 30 minute facial, a 60 minute massage (eight hands rubbing two people sounds fabulously sexy) and ends with an hour long dip in the public baths.  That right there is the date of all dates, my friends.