Carnival Club

This weekend Matt and I some of our friends went to Shenzhen to go to a spa called the Carnival Club. It is not like any spa that I have been to in the US...it is sort of like a cross between a spa and a casino. You go inside and they give the girls pink and white striped suits to put on, and the guys go and put on blue and white striped suits. In the locker room they have everything you could need: saunas, showers, steam rooms, individual rooms with milk baths, salt scrubs, and every grooming supply you would ever need.

In the main part of the spa, they have a huge room with chairs that have TV's attached. You can get a pedicure/manicure, or any of a whole variety of massages: foot, neck and shoulder, or scalp. Or, you can get your ears cleaned. I had that done once and I hated it but other people love it and say it feels good. They use a really long sharp needle type thing and try to scrape all of the wax out of your ear. Some people have a whole bunch of stuff come out. The whole time I was having my ears cleaned, I was worried they were going to accidentally jab me and pierce my ear drum...and then when the ordeal was over, he said I didn't even have any wax built up! How anticlimactic! I guess I am not a wax collector, like Grandma always said I was...

They also have separate rooms for full body massages. I had one ninety minute massage, and another 45 minute one later. I was in heaven! The place is huge, and has two restaurants, and little fruit platters that they bring to you while you are sitting. They also have a workout room, ping pong tables, pool tables, a "cinema" where you can watch movies, and mahjong/karaoke rooms. We played mahjong, which was really fun. Matt and I finally learned how, after two years of saying we wanted to learn. The scoring seems really complicated, but then, I was super tired after all the massaging and I don't think my brain was functioning properly.

We stayed there overnight. You can sleep in these little pods that are quiet and have pillows and blankets and everything. After spending almost 24 hours in the spa, I felt sort of weird...we left the next day at around 3 pm, and it was weird to be out in the fresh air again...The inside of the spa has the artificial feel of a casino, with fake trees and waterfalls and stuff. It is a self contained little world in there, you lose track of time. The crazy thing is, all of the massages and food and mahjong and sleeping and salt scrubs cost less that 100 US dollars. Matt's bill was only about 70 US dollars! Pretty cheap for all that pampering...

Before we went to the spa, we did some shopping and I picked up some spices. I thought I was buying cinnamon but, when I got it home I realized that it wasn't. Unless there are different types of cinnamon? I also got what I thought was turmeric, but is actually curry powder. They had lots of spices there for really cheap prices but they were labeled in Chinese, and I don't know my spices well enough to tell what they are without names. I want to buy more though, since it is so cheap, so I will have to do some research before I go to China next. I also bought more of my favorite tea, longjing green tea, and a new discovery: lemongrass. Tea made of this is so light and fresh tasting. It is delicious, especially when served cold!


The tea that I bought


The spices that I bought


This doesn't look like cinnamon to me, but I am not sure what else it would be...