The time I got a Thai massage

A few years ago, two friends and I were travelling around Asia. As Thai massages were dirt cheap, we’d been getting them every few days. You know, to ease the tension of travelling and having fun. It can be strenuous, honest. We usually got the massage were you change into blue pyjama-type things and they tug and pull and lean on you and by the time they’ve finished, you feel like you’ve had a proper work out.

This one time, we were in Cambodia, I think. The sign outside the massage place said they had been trained in the temple. Brilliant. I’m not saying that writing on a board outside a shop are credentials, as such, but we decided it would do for us. We went in and the others decided on the type of massage we had been getting everywhere else.

I, on the other hand was feeling crazy. I decided to get an oil massage. My friends were like, “O, but you need to be naked for that one cause it’s with oil,” and I was all carefree about it and like, “It’s no big deal. They must see naked bodies a thousand times a day. It’s all good.”

Sure enough, they told me to strip off and wait in the little curtained off bit lying on my front. This I did, whilst discreetly arranging the towel over my bum. There was lots of oil and lots of massaging and it was lovely and relaxing. There were times when she headed bum-ward when massaging the tops of my legs but I was terribly British about it and pretended it was totally cool and like, whatever, I hadn’t even noticed, I’m just so, like, cool and comfortable with my body and stuff. Yeh.

Then she asked me to turn over to massage my front. Clearly, I only had the one towel still so I made out like it was totally cool and I hadn’t even noticed that I was now boobs-out.

She massaged my legs with oil for quite a long time then patted the excess oil off with, yes you guessed it, the only towel covering me. She patted all the way to my feet then left the towel there. So now I was just a totally naked girl, lying on a floor in a massage parlour, wondering what on earth would happen next.

I daren’t open my eyes to look in case that was the signal she was waiting for, because by now, I was wondering what kind of ‘temple’ she had learned this massage stuff in. Yeh, I’m sadly at a loss on what the dodgy-massage-etiquette might be.

So I lay there and pretended that I was having such a relaxing massage that I’d just, kind of, fallen asleep.

Next minute, she asked me part my legs a little and she knelt in between them. My brain was really really not sure what was happening then. In the absence of any other plan, I continued feigning sleep. Then she leaned onto my hip bones with both her hands. For a very long time. Is that a massage technique? Hip leaning? Because this action had put her face very near the part of my body that had previously been covered.

I. Honestly. Didn’t. Know. What. To. Do. What would you have done, reader? What would you have done?

Me? I just kept my eyes closed and pretended this was all fine and natural and not wierd at all and, just, like, whatever, not even a big deal or anything. Yeh. Totally fine.

Then she stopped leaning and she just knelt there. It felt like she was waiting for the go-ahead. I kept ‘sleeping’.

After a little while, she came to kneel behind my head and there was a bit of almost-boob touching that I’m not sure was real massaging or dodgy massaging.

Then before I could say DodgyThaiMassage, one of the most surreal hours of my life was over.

I’ve still never worked out whether that was a real massage or a dodgy one. Opinions?