Blog Bath

When I stepped into Club Bath after an absence of two years, it felt like a homecoming. I saw some familiar faces among the staff. Whereas before they were manning the floor, they’ve since moved up and are now behind the counter, handling money and stuff. But there were a good number of new faces too, most of them young, thin and short. That must be the casting brief for “bath house staff.”

The general structure and facilities remain mostly the same as two years ago, but everything looks very well maintained. The rooms are as I remembered them, with minor but noteworthy improvements: gone are the bulky stand-alone side tables that take up space, replaced by slimmer cabinets attached to the walls; and a portion of the floor is now covered with a no-slip matting (rubber?). The most obvious renovations are the shower rooms and the toilets—they’re cleaner, swankier and more stylish, with Zen-like décor and aura. You can tell that the owners of CB have better design taste than the owners of F.

The crowd definitely skews older than F, but one can still spot yuppies and even chuppies (chinese yuppies, not chumuchupang yuppies, pero puwede na rin!) in CB. If you see someone in F with a defined body, more often it’s the slimness of a fresh grad. Ah, the beauty of youth, when one is still physically active and financially strapped! They cannot afford to eat and drink all they want so their bellies remain flat, or relatively flatter than most. In CB the guys either have the belly of someone living it large, or a fairly well maintained body that has seen its share of expensive and fattening food.

I find the crowd in CB better behaved than in F. The silence rule is honored by most, thanks to signs that say, “The thrill is in silence” all over the place. And because the walls of the cubicles and rooms are high enough, no one dares to peer over the walls, unlike in F. In CB there are no noisy videokes stacked with Celine Dion and Mariah Carey songs, no XXX-rated videos, no Jacuzzi and no liquor bar. But they do have a steam room, and in the “bar” you can even have Chow King delivered. Sey n’yo sa Chow King, ha! Have your cock and eat siopao too.

While CB is a bit more expensive than F, in the end it’s really a matter of taste (and no, I’m not talking about asado versus bola-bola). Do you prefer to cuddle up to papas or do you want pretty young things? Are you a bear-lover or do you have an inner pedophile? In many ways CB and F are the same in ways all bathhouses—and their clientele—are alike. But just to highlight the difference, it’s the genteel restraint of old-rich Pasay versus the brash, rebellious energy of middle-class Cubao.