The steam hangs gauzelike in the air, hissing into the room like a snake, bringing with it an herbal heat that prickles the nose, the lips, the throat. In this dewy fever, I can hear the women around me better than I can see them, these pink and tan blurs of wet flesh, talking among themselves, laughing, those who aren't laughing quietly wilting into the damp, limp as the sopping towels they sit on.

When we can take the heat no more, we spill out into the relatively cool air of a larger room, plunge into a cold pool that forces from our lips sounds like aaarghh and oooooh and aiiieeee, the frigid water coaxing goose bumps to the surface of our skin. We repeat this process -- hot, cold, hot, cold -- time and time again, naked women among other naked women, bodies slender and zaftig, sharing the heady pleasures of this public bathhouse with an unself-conscious abandon.

But first, let us come clean: Bathhouse is not a dirty word. Yes, in our American culture, bathing is most often a solitary endeavor, done behind closed (and perhaps locked) doors in the privacy of home sweet home. And here in the States, the use of the words "bath" and "house" in direct conjunction tends to imply a place where bathing isn't exactly the priority.

And yet, public bathhouses have existed since ancient times and still today, in many other countries, remain a typical part of the average person's hygiene. The sentos of Japan, the banyas of Russia, the saunas of Finland, the hammams of Turkey and Morocco -- these are places where sweating, steaming and scrubbing have long been something that's done as a community surrounded by family, friends, neighbors. These bathhouses are places not just to get clean, but to talk and socialize, to catch up on the latest gossip. And while nudity in front of members of the same sex often is the norm, these are not pickup joints. Here, flesh is simply a fact of life. Now a handful of businesses are bringing this long-held tradition back to Seattle and the surrounding area.

Drawing on the customs of yore, they have created Old World-style bathhouses with a New World flair. "We want to combine both Eastern and Western cultures," says SunsimSo, manager of the new Olympus Spa in Lynnwood, a Korean-style women's bathhouse that celebrated its grand opening last week. The Korean bathhouse culture is finding fertile ground here in the Northwest. The original Olympus women's spa, south of Tacoma 1997. And in February, Newlife Fitness & Spa also opened in Lynnwood -- a spacious Korean-inspired bathhouse with facilities for both men and women. Meanwhile, in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Banya 5 delivers the lively Russian-style bathhouse experience. And on Capitol Hill, the womblike Hothouse Spa offers an intimate women's retreat that embraces public bath practices as a whole, rather than as part of a specific culture. , was the first in this new wave of bathhouses, opening its doors in

Though each is different in its own way, all of these bathhouses offer communal spaces for sweating, steaming, soaking and washing. All charge a single, relatively low entry fee (from $12 to $30 for an unlimited day pass). All forgo fluffy luxury in favor of a more authentic experience. "Some of us find luxury irritating," says John Goodfellow, a Seattle commercial real estate developer and the man who opened Banya 5 in fall 2004 as an alternative to the standard American spa. Stylishly designed yet studiously utilitarian, this public bath is meant to be a "beachhead into a new, robust theory of health," says Goodfellow, a place that doesn't rely on cloying cushness and costly treatments to make a person feel revitalized. Says he, "People are tired of being pampered and scented." Miseon Dunnigan, manager of the Newlife spa, agrees. "This is not really a pampering place. It's more of a getaway place." Far away close to home In my travels to Ouarzazate, Morocco, I visited an authentic women's bathhouse for the first time. Certainly, this was no fancy affair. In fact, it was quite the opposite: hidden in a back street, tucked into a nondescript building, walls cracked and faded, central drain clogged ... and still it hummed with the buoyant energy of dozens of near-nude women doing what was natural to them: Scrubbing. Steaming. Talking.

In Morocco, many people don't have showers, tubs or hot water in their homes. Instead, they pack up towels and soap and head to public baths -- called hammams. There's at least one in almost every city and oftentimes there's one for the men and another for the women. If not, the two sexes share but on alternate days. Stepping inside this hammam challenged everything I thought I knew about propriety, body image and personal space. Moroccan women who, outside the bathhouse, cover themselves to the extremes of modesty, sat inside the hammam, flesh bared for all their fellow women to see, scouring the intimate parts of their bodies -- and each other's bodies -- with an unabashed and utterly sexless zeal. For them, this seemed to be a home away from home. I've been fascinated by the public baths of the world ever since. And in this, I'm not alone. "You've got to like to sweat," Goodfellow says as he shows me the crown jewel of Banya 5 -- the parilka. This custom-built brick oven heats "The Russian Room" to temperatures upwards of 230 degrees, the kind of bone-penetrating hot that'll have sweat gushing out your pores faster than you can say nyet. It was in New York that Goodfellow experienced his first Russian bathhouse. He was hung over, in need of a good detox when he succumbed to the parilka's fierce radiant heat. But it wasn't just this ritual of purging sweat that intrigued him, it was the jovial social atmosphere -- the Russians welcoming him with conversation, shots of vodka and pickles -- that won him over. The banya is so much a social place that former Russian President Boris Yeltsin is said to have taken foreign dignitaries for steam-infused negotiations. Likewise, the hammams of Morocco are reputed to be the place mothers find wives for their sons. In a bathhouse in Budapest, I watched flabby-fleshed old men play chess while steeping in medicinal waters. "It's very conducive to loosening tongues, all that steam and heat," says Bob Martin, of Seattle. He grew up in working-class Birmingham, England, at a time when nobody in his neighborhood had an indoor bathroom of their own or running hot water. "The one thing every neighborhood had was the local bathhouse and that's where most people went to take a weekly bath," he says. "That was my first love of hot water." As a teenager, a Pakistani friend introduced Martin to the Turkish bathhouse attached to a nearby public pool. He loved that too, loved the mysterious sea of steam and the way the men gathered not just to sweat but to jaw about the day's news. It's no surprise then that he and his friend Kenn Arning were the first two in the door on Banya 5's opening day. They now visit every Friday for a soak, a chat and a dose of international society. "I've been there some nights when my buddy Kenn and I are the only English-speaking people in the place," Martin says enthusiastically. Indeed, on a recent Friday night, "The Russian Room" echoed with the sounds of its mother tongue as groups of Russians rotated in and out of the broiling space, taking time to flog themselves with soaked tree branches (veniks) as is the custom in their country. Goodfellow estimates that 40 percent of Banya 5's clientele comes from the local Russian community. But who knows how long that will last? Initially, Korean immigrants and visitors made up 90 percent of the patrons at the first Olympus Spa, the other 10 percent non-Koreans. But as word spread about the virtues of the Asian bathhouse, that ratio flip-flopped, says Sun Kyong Lee, president of the new Olympus facility in Lynnwood. "We didn't imagine our clientele shift would be this dramatic," he says. 'Just try it once' Certainly, to the uninitiated, a trip to a bathhouse can be a daunting experience.

For starters, most of these places encourage visitors to dip, sweat and wash while in the buff (except, of course, when men and women are together). I remember how uncomfortable I felt upon my initial foray into the Moroccan hammam. Nude in front of all these other women, I flushed red with embarrassment while they showed not a lick of bashfulness over their bareness. It didn't take long to realize: If they don't care, then why should I? "It's a unique experience for some," says Matria O'Hora who created and co-owns Hothouse Spa on Capitol Hill with Julio LaFleur. "What I say to people is: Just try it once and if it's not for you, then please don't come back." Of course, submitting to a traditional body scrub at one of the Korean bathhouses (a specialty) is an even greater exercise in an un-American level of intimacy. "My butt is so soft right now, I can't stop touching it," laughed Molly Cherry, a massage practitioner and friend, after receiving one of Olympus' renowned -- and especially thorough -- body scrubs. "It's part of our culture that you go to a bathhouse and do a scrub," Lee explains. Rough mitts on hands, fathers scrub sons, mothers scrub daughters, friends scrub each other. Alternatively, you can hire someone to buff almost every nook and cranny of your body -- breasts and bums included -- with a fastidiousness that can be intense for the first-time scrubee. The result, however, is undeniable: skin like silk. "At first it's weird and very foreign," says Cat Cabalo, a Seattle lawyer, good friend and fan of the Korean body scrubs. "But then I got used to it." Cat, Molly and myself, along with a handful of female friends, spent nearly five hours on a recent evening enjoying the spacious new Olympus facility in Lynnwood. Stripped of makeup, jewelry and clothes, handed thin, depersonalizing cotton robes and pink cotton caps to wear for those moments when we weren't naked, it was almost as if we all started to blend together into one united everywoman. Bodies were just that: bodies. Lumps of slick clean skin. Nothing less. Nothing more. "You're really forced to accept your body," Cat says. "And you see women of all shapes and sizes really happy to be here."