Massages with Uncle Fred

So I wake up Sunday morning and after a quick Skype call home, decide that the day is going to be a recovery day to lay in bed and recuperate. The original plan, made on Saturday, was to sleep in Sunday and head over to Fort San Domingo in the afternoon with Uncle Fred. Plans are subject to change, though, and my body just jumped from subject history to biology. There would be no sightseeing today, only a little R&R. Play a little Yahtzee and watch some World Baseball Classic in Chinese. At least that's how I wanted the day to go. Uncle Fred had other plans.

The call from Fred is expected to come around 1230-1 Sunday. So, naturally, he shows up at the hotel around 1030 catching Johnny and I completely off guard.
"Fred, I'm not going out today. I need to rest and recover."
"OK, so we'll just go out for a little bit then."
"Fred, no, I'm not leaving the hotel."
"Come on then, I have an idea. I've been waiting for an excuse to go and this is my opportunity. We'll go get massages. Very relaxing."

Needless to say, we were in the massage parlor about 20 minutes later. We may have jumped the gun a bit because we got there around 11 and the masseuses (masseese? (masseusi?)) don't start work until noon, but we headed to our room, stripped down, and donned kimonos. About an hour later, three young, and very attractive Taiwanese girls walk through the door. They giggle. I nervously giggle along with them. Uncle Fred yaps away in Mandarin and five minutes later they know my whole life story. My lovely masseuse goes to work.

As her palms, fingertips, knuckles, elbows and arms gently kneed, press and roll squeeze the stress from my sinews, I drift off to another world where fevers and stomach aches just don't matter. She works on my neck and back as I lay face up and clearly she has done this before, although I like to pretend she hasn't. I roll over onto my stomach and she begins to layer hot towel upon hot towel, one after another after another, like she is building the great wall of relaxation right there on my spine. Once this cushion of steam has grown large enough, she stands up on the table. Her infinitesimally small feet walk along my body from the tips of my toes all the way up to my neck. Fred was right, this is indeed relaxing. I could get used to this.

Cue the foot guy. I should note that as the foot guy enters the room, Fred begins to describe the experience of the foot massage with a quick anecdote about his Japanese friend who could not stop screaming throughout the massage. So a man of Japanese descent, the group of people who survived the atom bomb and godzilla, screamed throughout his entire experience with the Taiwanese foot man. Great. The foot man goes to work. I'm doing fine the first half, as he uncomfortably digs his knuckles into the little tissue I have on the bottom of my foot, but I focus on my lovely masseuse, who is now working my jaw and eye sockets (it feels a lot better than it sounds). I begin to lose it when he performs a twisting motion on each of my toes that feels and sounds like it came from the Spanish Inquisition. But I survived, and live to tell the tale. I just know never to get the foot massage again.