Our Anniversary and Thai Massages

My DH and I got to celebrate our anniversary here in Thailand! Our day started when my sweet hubby served me breakfast in bed, our infamous healthy pancakes topped with fresh Thai fruits. Healthy and delicious!

Later that day we had Thai massages. My hubby’s parents were very gracious, and ordered the massages “to-go” I guess you could say? The masseuses came to the house and setup there for a two-hour couples massage session. (With Adam hanging out with his grandparents, hoorah!)

A two hour Thai couple’s massage session sounds both romantic and exotic, and while it was an interesting experience, and most definitely exotic, I don’t know that it was romantic, or my style massage…  It was far too painful to be romantic. I think I’m more of a Spa sort of person, lay the hot rocks on me and perhaps do a light oil massage. Thai massages, however, are intense!

We wore our own comfortable clothes, and the massages were given on the floor, as is traditional. They folded their hands and murmured a brief prayer (or perhaps blessing? I don’t speak Thai so I’m not positive which it was…) before beginning the massage. There are many components to a Thai massage, part is to get you stretched out, and I was told part of the objective is to assist in circulation to rejuvenate the body. Both parts were rather painful, but the assistance of circulation was the worst! The masseuse would lean on various parts of the body (generally in the vicinity of an artery) and apply firm pressure. Just as I was getting tingly numb and could feel the restricted blood flow throbbing, she would release the pressure and the blood flow would rush back into its various channels.

They started with the legs and worked their way up the body ending with the head, rotating the body as needed to reach all sides. The masseuse my husband got was a smaller, older woman, while I received a rather large younger woman. I recall upon several occasions when her full body was putting pressure on me, lamenting that I had been given the bigger girl. “Would it be rude to ask her to sit on my husband instead, in trade for the smaller woman to sit on me?” I thought. And no joke, she often sat on me - on her knees - with her full weight.

She also enjoyed quickly pulling and snapping my toes and fingers out. This practice was fairly successful on my toes, however she had difficulty and frequently no success popping my fingers out, which on numerous occasions resulted in my entire arm jerking downward. She told me in her thick accent that I had “Bad fingers” and sadly shook her head back and forth. I think I apologized for them, I can’t quite recall. As she dug her knee into the artery of my arm, she also told me that I wasn’t relaxing enough. This was true, I could have relaxed more, however, I felt certain that she would snap my limbs if I did, so I only released as far as was bearable. The scariest part was when she snapped my neck to the left and right. I was terrified she would snap my head right off! It was a painful and sore when she cracked my neck, and I think it was the main contributor to the headache I had for hours after the massage.  

Adam loves to be a part of everything we're doing, and he spent the first small portion of our massages with us. Here he is assisting in giving his daddy a hand massage. (Photo courtesy of grandma Na!)

Contrary to my painful experience, my husband loved the massage and said he wished he could get one on a weekly basis! However, he also lifts weights regularly and requires a deeper tissue massage to get his kinks out. Perhaps being sat on by a smaller woman helps too… I was told it’s something that you simply need to get used to, and that it gets better and more beneficial the more frequently you get one. Good to know, but definitely going to pass on that experience though! I was very appreciative to have experienced it once, glad that my husband enjoyed it immensely more than I did, and also thankful my kind in-laws brought them to the house and watched our little one for us so we could have some “us” time. Albeit painful “us” time…